Before the War: A Feminist Take

By John Skow

It's an eerie sensation to read Jane Smiley's prankish new novel, set in pre-Civil War Kansas, after campaigning with the fiery abolitionist John Brown through the same time and terrain in Russell Banks' thunderous epic Cloudsplitter. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Knopf; 448 pages; $26) follows Lidie, a sturdy young Illinois bride, to the dust-blown outpost of Lawrence, Kans., in the tumultuous year of 1855. Lawrence is a raw, ill-favored roost of newly arrived Free Soil settlers, jostled by drunken proslave irregulars from Missouri and protected, mostly with words, by gassy politicians. John Brown and his terrible sons, the focus of Banks' harsh panorama, are just out of sight in Smiley's account, raiding and murdering.

Lidie is chunky and unbeautiful, but no fool, and handy with rifle and horse. When her naive husband is killed by proslave thugs, she sets out to avenge him. As she relates breezily in her journal (each chapter preceded by a passage from Miss Catherine E. Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School), female dress becomes a hindrance. Miss Beecher recommends self-reliance and deplores corsets, and Lidie, therefore, disguises herself as a boy. This works long enough to take her to a plantation in slave country but fails when she has a miscarriage. Further adventures set down by Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres, include an unwelcome marriage proposal from a doddering plantation owner and a threatened death sentence for stealing a slave. Lidie prevails and returns to Illinois, having, like the beguiled reader, seen an astonishing array of clamor and calamity.

--J.S.