Word: lydia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...LYDIA BAILEY (488 pp.) - Kenneth Roberts-Doubleday...
Poor thing, they said, she died only last year, young and far from home, carried off by the yellow fever in French Haiti. Lydia Bailey, late of Philadelphia, looked as pure and demure in her portrait (by Gilbert Stuart, of course) as only a heroine in a historical novel can look. Handsome young Albion Hamlin stared at the portrait, shivered, felt "something intimate and personal" catch at his throat. The time: 1800-05. The range: post-Revolutionary U.S., the troubled Haiti of Toussaint L'Ouverture, North Africa at the time of the Barbary Wars...
Irascible, fact-conscious Kenneth Roberts, a heckler of historians and probably the most widely admired of U.S. historical novelists, is said to have spent six years on Lydia Bailey, grubbing details from archives, translating French sources, writing and polishing the text. Even so, Lydia is a pretty light-weight performance. But the first printing (including Literary Guild) is rumored to be 1,000,000 copies. Hollywood's 20th Century-Fox has already bought the story for $215,000. As a narrative it lacks the fire and dramatic punch of Northwest Passage, the unity and cogency of Oliver Wiswell...
Minor Mission. Author Roberts is best known as a novelist with a vengeance, or at least a mission: in Rabble in Arms he argued the forgotten merits of Benedict Arnold, in Wiswell he made an earnest case for colonial Loyalists and Tories. In Lydia, the mission is a minor one. Roberts' main aim seems to be to expose the incompetence of Tobias Lear, onetime private secretary to George Washington...
...time.* Byron was a professional prizefighter but, like Tunney, he was contaminated by literature, music and the arts. He happened to fall in love with an heiress who combined an income of ?40,000 a year with an interest in Spinoza. In the ring Cashel was superb; Lydia once heard him raging like a lion: "'Rules be d-d, he bit me, and I'll throw...