The character of Lydia Aspen, and the tensions and transformations which she produces in the lives of others, dominates the novel. Lydia is the illegitimate daughter of a fifty-year-old man and a young woman of bad reputation whom Lydia never knew. Starved of affection in childhood, her emotional development was severely retarded, and when Richardson first sees her, he estimates her age to be at least four years younger than it really is. She is withdrawn, thin, and physically awkward. Yet, as Richardson gradually realizes, “there was something molten underneath it all.” She soon shows herself to be impatient, forthright, strong-willed, and impulsive, with the inevitable self-centeredness of the emotionally immature. She wants and expects to get her own way and learns quickly how to exert her charm to this end. Few people in the novel know how to say no to her. She even has an almost magical power to soothe the uncouth and belligerent Blackie Johnson and eventually to subdue him totally.

Her sudden entry into a new and exciting social world is too quick, however, for her to acquire a sense of caution regarding the intense feelings that she arouses in others. Sometimes she seems curiously indifferent to the effects of her words and actions. She watches the fight between Alex and Blackie with a kind of detached and fascinated calmness, apparently unaware that she, at least in part, is the cause of it. Richardson realizes, in one of his most acute moments of insight, that Lydia, as she grows to maturity, is one of those people who “think less and less and less. Thought is driven out by a growing automatism of instinct and feeling and blood . . . blood drives and governs and pushes them along.”

Richardson, the narrator, is the most interesting of the young men in the novel. There is a strong autobiographical element in the author’s portrayal of him. Like H. E. Bates, Richardson comes from a respectable working-class background; he, too, is intelligent and well read, and his unhappiness as a reporter reflects Bates’s own dislike of the job he held as a young man on the Northamptonshire Chronicle.

Diffident and shy (“That’s what you’ve got to get over,” his employer Bretherton yells at him), Richardson, in his naivete, is quite unprepared for his encounter with Lydia. Transported into a happiness which he has never known before, his inexperience makes him acutely vulnerable and unable to meet the tests which such an intense involvement with another human being must inevitably place before him. He reveals some unpleasing qualities—jealousy, childishness, sarcasm—and he tends to retreat into himself, or run away, when crises occur. Eventually, he is forced to come to terms with the changing phases that love goes through over a period of time, and this brings him to a new maturity.

Other characters are competently drawn but unexceptional, lacking in complexity and showing little growth or change throughout the novel. Alex, the well-to-do, snappily dressed man-about-town, is a contrast to the more reflective Richardson. The simple good nature of Nancy Holland, the down-to-earth country girl, is in marked contrast to the flirtatious Lydia. Richardson treats Nancy with less than compassion, however, finding her as bland as a drink of milk, “fresh and clean and smooth, neither warm nor cool, neither flat nor exciting.” She is far more eager for a serious relationship with him than he will ever be with her.

Richardson

Richardson, the protagonist and narrator, nineteen years old. At the beginning of the story, he is naïvely dissatisfied with his position at the local newspaper...