Word: lydia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Taking a firm grip on Kenneth Robert's "Lydia Bailey" she announced, "But gosh, I'm going to get married and I don't know what I'm doing here...
Kenneth Roberts came across this diary while researching his latest novel, Lydia Bailey (TIME, Jan. 6), and got all excited about it. Written in French, and almost unknown in the U.S., the diary was a sophisticated study, by an observant French emigre, of the callow U.S. of the 1790s. Roberts persuaded his wife to translate it and polished the translation himself. First of Moreau de St. Méry's many works to be put into English, it is not to be compared for literary quality to the contemporary notes of another French traveler, Chateaubriand. But it introduces...
Reunited: Cinemactress Ilona Massey and her very motherly-looking mother, Mrs. Lydia Hagymasy, who arrived from Budapest; after ten years; at New York's LaGuardia Field. Actress Massey was having a full week: she had just appealed to Washington to let her Aunt Terez stay in the U.S., and she was about to marry Tier third husband...
Author Roberts finally pins Lear to the mat as one of the culprits in our "disgraceful as well as heroic" Tripolitan War. To do so he follows Lear from Haiti to the Mediterranean, dragging Albion and Lydia along to make love on the way. Albion reaches Haiti, finds Lydia not dead from yellow fever at all, and as pretty as her picture. He also finds Napoleon's troops trying to put down Toussaint's revolution, and willy-nilly mixes in on Toussaint's side. By page 300 Haiti is left far behind; Albion and Lydia languish...
Roberts' fans are most likely to enjoy the Haitian chapters, many of which bubble with the heat and smell of the country, the tragicomic chaos of the days of Toussaint, Henri Christophe and Dessalines. Lydia's standout character: King Dick, giant, uninhibited Sudanese ex-slave who figured in Author Roberts' The Lively Lady and who swaggers happily around Haiti with pearls as big as birds' eggs, a harem of doting wives and a 5-ft. bamboo shillelagh. Lydia Bailey is the stuff that sells, but doesn't survive...