Smiley, Jane. Lidie: The Further Travels and Adventures
of Lidie Newton
This is a 2nd novel covering the life of Lidie Newton. In pre-Civil War Illinois, she is a tall and kind of horse-faced woman from a poor family who is thrown into dependence upon her sisters after the violent death of her abolitionist husband in the Kansas Territory. The opening of this book moves slowly because it spends a good deal of time on the backstory of Book One, which covers information on her family life in Quincy, IL before the war and her tragic marriage.
As we meet her,
Lidie is still mourning the violence that took her husband, but is now ready
for more of life. She is a woman who thrives on assisting others, and she now
finds herself assisting her niece Annie in developing a career as an actress. This
happens because a successful local production catches the eye of a touring
British producer/actor. He is so convinced of Annie’s talent that he sends Annie
and Lidie, now functioning as Annie’s protector and maid, across the Atlantic to his home in Liverpool. His
stated intention is to develop Annie’s talents before launching her toward potential
stardom in London.
You must now accept that the producer has a
remarkable nose for latent talent or just more money than sense. The two women
want to change their lives so intently that they literally take new names for
their overseas adventure. Annie becomes Anne Revere and Lidie becomes Helen
Longbourn, a name built up out of a Jane Austen novel. After they arrive in
England, they live as guests in the producer’s elegant home. Lydie (now Helen) not
only assists Annie(now Anne) in her theatrical development but also becomes a
sort of family dogsbody. She runs errands for everyone. She does the shopping
for the cook, picks up purchases for the master of the house and his wife, and
even stands in for the butler on occasion. This gives her time to walk Liverpool’s
streets and soak up its general history, its beauty, its commerce, and its
religious and ethnic diversity. This is presented in great detail and was for
me interesting as a contrast to life in a small midwestern town in the mid-19th
century.
While I admit to finding
this entire plot angle a stretch, Anne Revere’s theatrical talent does seem to
be real. Lidie, however, develops in a wholly different track. She finds intellectual
enlightenment in Britain, where slavery has already been abolished. She also
finds some male contacts in town that add relational uncertainty. Barnsby, the family
butler, John, the pastor of a small church, and Regie, a gardener from another
household all start to see her in more intimate terms. This puts her life
in more flux than Annie’s, although both women are still pursuing a more
independent life than most women in the 19th century.
Lidie’s story presents an
unsuspected finish that may be as big a stretch as the finding of a drama queen
in a tiny Illinois town in the 1860’s. Is it giving too much away, to say that
it all seems to be a setup for a third book featuring the further further adventures of
the same characters.
I give it a three out of
five.
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