Library Journal Review

Both popular (The Darling Buds of May, My Uncle Silas) and prolific (approximately 70 works of fiction to his credit), H.E. Bates was a writer of English pastoral life who flourished around World War II. The novel Love for Lydia was written in 1952; Bates died in 1974. The story is told through the besotted-and then wide-open-eyes of Edward Richardson, a wannabe writer stuck in a dead-end newspaper job in Evensford, a small town in the English Midlands. When Edward first meets Lydia, she's a shy teenager recovering from the sudden death of her father and having trouble adjusting to life with two caring maiden aunts and her worthless uncle. She's an heiress but possesses few social skills. This odd duck, however, grows into a vain and self-centered beauty. While not great drama or even a great story, Love for Lydia is a must for diehard Masterpiece Theatre fans-those individuals who cannot get enough of British social life. This 25-year-old television series presents an interesting picture of life in an English backwater in the Roaring Twenties, but the resolution is puzzling. Happy endings are fine when they are not as outrageously fanciful and unsatisfying as the one Bates provided. Slow, sometimes plodding-with long stretches where nothing seems to happen except dancing-the series takes a lot of stamina to watch straight through. Look for the very young Jeremy Irons as the tragic Alex Sanderson-a good deal of the program's life goes out when he leaves the screen. All the major and minor actors are excellent, even though the writing-or perhaps the dramatization by Julian Bond-doesn't always make their motivations entirely clear. Recommended for mature audiences only.-Jo Manning, MLS, Miami Beach, FL(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.