Historian, author, editor, educator Remy Benoit's ongoing weblog for Veterans, writers, students, others who believe in learning from and making history. Thousands of articles and posts and a free writing seminar, Using History for Healing and Writing.
—"The best works by living writers on the heart of New Orleans." Miz' Remy is the author of Annie.
Letty is a love story. Yet it is much more than simply the story of Letty Singleworth and Jacob Jordan, for it is the story of their time which spans the years between 1873 and l918, the years when this country faces the loss of it's innocence.
Letty is the daughter of Stuart Singleworth Sr., a noveau riche businessman who seeks power and respectability amidst the robber barons of his time. Yet along the way, Stuart loses himself, his beautiful, loving wife, Lydia, and manages to alienate almost all of his offspring.
Jacob and Letty meet when he is six and she is three on the shoreline of a barrier island where her father has replaced his wife's small cottage with a large double towered house in keeping with his position in society. For Lydia, the loss of her cottage is a metaphor for the loss of the husband with whom she can no longer communicate despite her unrelenting efforts.
Jacob and Letty's bond is set there the first day on the shoreline and spans the growing years when they can only summer together. Yet despite their months of physical separation, they are never apart in their love and thoughts, in their love for words which for them take on lives of their own in the saying.
There are a vast variety of characters who touch the lives of Letty and Jacob and their respective mothers, Lydia Singleworth and Margaret Jordan, the Island librarian and wife of a sea captain.
Lydia and Margaret hand over the position of Keeper of the Island Journals, the foundation of both Letty and Island Quilts to Letty's eldest brother, Stuart Jr. who has split with the father in a confrontation over Social Darwinism and the rights of the working man.
When George Jones, the Island school teacher, takes young Jacob to the city book sellers, the young man comes of age as he sees the reality of the tenements in the lives of Maggie and her father, Kevin Cormac. The lives of these people become intertwined, as do many others, with the lives of the people of the Island.
The ghost of the Aztec beauty Maria, wife of the Conquistador Don Miguel from Island Quilts drifts through these pages, as do a series of current and historical Journals, in a pattern that continues in Island Quilts, whose main character is the granddaughter of Letty Singleworth.
The artistic life of Letty's sister, Amanda, takes the reader to Paris and back to the Armory Show of 1913, while one of Letty's brothers loses himself in drugs and liquor in New Orleans, to find himself at the First Battle of the Marne in September of 1914. Stuart Sr. faces himself with the sinking of the Titanic as an old love of Lydia's comes back into her life.
The underlying theme of Letty is the characters learning of themselves and of each other; of Love in its many forms; and of the wonder of giving of themselves without restraint, to those people and things they love and care for, even through the trials of hunger and hatred, war and pestilence. They find that these shadows serve only to magnify the light.
Letty predates Island Quilts, set in the 1990's, bridging two centuries with this theme.
Both Sides of the Wall: Reflections of the West Point Class of 1968 (Edited by Remy Benoit).
Read Jerry Wenstrom's review of Loving.
Rhea and Jordan Devereaux had it all: undying devotion, a tender love, and a grand passion. And then the Vietnam War separated them. Follow the course of their love across time and space. Journey with them through the steaming jungle; dance with the Mardi Gras revelers while revolution unseats Louis XVI and protestors on the Washington Mall scream, Hell, NO. We won't Go. Sail with Laffite's pirates into Devil's Isle and rejoice as an unconditional and timeless love emerges victorious.
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