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Amazon.com's Price: $79.99 Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9781569386484
Format: Box set, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
ISBN: 156938648X
Label: Acorn Media
Manufacturer: Acorn Media
Number Of Items: 4
Publisher: Acorn Media
Region Code: 1
Release Date: September 09, 2003
Running Time: 650 minutes
Sales Rank: 40329
Studio: Acorn Media
Theatrical Release Date: September 23, 1979
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Love for Lydia is almost inexplicably engrossing. The central character, Edward Richardson (Christopher Blake), is a young, would-be writer whose emotional immaturity and lack of worldly experience in the Roaring Twenties hamper his aspirations. Worse, he seems incapable of a selfless deed and at times is an outright brute, particularly toward women.
Edward's obsessive longing for the beautiful Lydia Aspen (Mel Martin), a once-sheltered heiress sent to live with two elderly aunts and a drunken uncle in Edward's small, English hometown, can be redundant and tedious. His childhood friends include the wealthy Alex (Jeremy Irons), a charming, even buoyant alcoholic whose vaguely incestuous bond with a youthful mother has made him an unrepentant heartbreaker. Both men grew up with sibling farmers Tom (Peter Davison) and Nancy (Sherrie Hewson) Holland, the former a naive pushover and the latter a country mouse bravely nursing an unrequited love for Edward. None of these characters is prepared for Lydia, a suggestively psychotic angel who plays each of them against the others in her bid for sexual independence and thrill-seeking.
It may be asking a lot to expect viewers to spend 13 near-hour-long episodes with these sometimes painfully unripened people (the series was originally broadcast in America on Masterpiece Theatre, in 1979). Yet Love for Lydia, based on a novel by H.E. Bates, is a compelling, unusually Darwinian drama about surviving a difficult transition into adulthood during heady times. Not everyone is going to come through, and those who do may or may not, for those keeping score, be the most cosmetically appealing or romantically deserving. (The series' very title, Love for Lydia, may evoke hearts and flowers, but in the context of the story it also suggests a syndrome of restless, compulsive self-interest, a shadowy period before one's facility to achieve an attainable destiny, at any cost, reveals itself.)
More than anything, performances make Love for Lydia eminently watchable, particularly Martin's difficult role as a complex siren and Irons's sharp, colorful work as a tragic, lovable rake. --Tom Keogh
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - PBS Masterpiece Theatre Classic
The love of Lydia is the story of an heiress who grows up amid aristocratic society of the 1920s to 1930s England. Lydia is beautiful and lives life through a self-centered personality that makes men fall passionately in love with her while she simply toys with their emotions, not caring a bit for the pain and suffering she causes to others wherever she goes.
The story is filmed with the exquisite care of every detail that PBS Masterpiece Theatre provides. The development of the characters ... Read More
Rating:  - Disappointing
I was hoping for something on a par with "Pride and Prejudice" or "Upstairs Downstairs"; this doesn't approach that. The production quality may be okay, but I don't consider the story itself to be worth the time.
Rating: - Love for Lydia Revisited
My wife and I just finished watching the 13 episodes of one of our favorite Masterpiece Theater offerings as the DVD version. It has been nearly 30 years since it appeared on PBS, thus we saw it from a different perspective than our initial viewing. It was still a compelling experience, and particularly interesting to see the early performances by Jeremy Irons, Peter Davison, Christopher Blake and Mel Martin. We continue to associate them with the roles they played in this production. Rachel Kempson, ... Read More
Rating:  - WIll You Hate Her?
Well I have mixed feelings about this Masterpiece Theater Production. I'm not sure I would want own it to watch over and over, once may be enough, but it was thoroughly well made, it never occured to me this was a 1970ish film. The acting was top of the line, costumes and sets were certainly well done and not cheap.
But as to the story, I am a person who likes to like the people in the movie. Like would be way too strong a word for these charcters, there were only redeeming moments, in fact the ... Read More
Rating: - True love....
LOVE FOR LYDIA, written by H.E. Bates (Darling Buds of May, My Uncle Silas) is 650 minutes of one of the best BBC/Masterpiece Theater presentations I've seen. The quality of the DVD transfer is B- but the story is so compelling, the photography so beautiful, and life in rural England in the late 1920's and early 1930's is so lovingly depicted that you will probably not care.
LYDIA is a love story, but it is also a complex psychological drama with fabulous character development. The six main characters ... Read More
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