The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The protagonist of Jane Smiley’s THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON, Lidie Newton, is unprepared for the new home to which her husband takes her. Lawrence, in the Kansas Territory, is a center of anti-slavery agitation and her husband is on his way from Massachusetts to take an active part in the resistance to the Missourians who seek to prevent Kansas from achieving statehood as a slave-free state.

Kansas is not the paradise which was portrayed in the advertisements. The climate is not friendly and armed raiders make life difficult and dangerous. Before a year has passed, the young couple have planted a meager crop and built a small shack on their claim, but Lidie’s husband and her beloved horse are shot and killed by three pro-slavery intruders. Lidie determines to hunt down the assassins and avenge her husband.

The second half of the novel covers a few short weeks in which Lidie travels to Missouri looking for clues to the identity of the slayers. She travels across Missouri before collapsing and having a miscarriage on the plantation of a slave owner named Richard Day. She is cared for and nursed back to health by Day’s daughter Helen and a slave named Lorna. Day, a widower, asks Lidie to marry him but she runs away, accompanied by Lorna, who is making a second attempt to escape to freedom. They are foiled and Lidie is forced to return to her original home in Illinois, where her five older half-sisters reside.

THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON, Smiley’s seventh novel, is further evidence of her versatility as an author. It provides a vivid picture of a time and place in American history which has been mostly forgotten, and it contains a lively and most unusual heroine.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIV, February 15, 1998, p. 949.

Christian Science Monitor. April 30, 1998, p. B2.

Library Journal. CXXIII, April 1, 1998, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 5, 1998, p. 4.

Mademoiselle. CIV, May, 1998, p. 166.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, April 5, 1998, p. 10.

The New Yorker. LXXIV, April 6, 1998, p. 104.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, February 2, 1998, p. 80.

Time. CLI, March 2, 1998, p. 77.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 25, 1998, p. 22.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, April 12, 1998, p. 5.

Women’s Review of Books. XV, July, 1998, p. 28.