LETTY

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Remy Benoit holds degrees in history from the Pennsylvania State University and from West Chester University. She taught her subject for many years and then began home schooling her own children and writing historical fiction while working independently with teenagers and Veterans of the Vietnam War. It is her feeling that in the hands of today's young people there is an unprecedented opportunity for paving the way to global peace and understanding. In working together with Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder she would like to open a national dialogue for understanding, coming together, and healing. She resides in Louisiana with her daughter and son, a Lhasa Apso named Gypsy and a cat called Norman. She has written three other books: Letty, Pastiche, and Peace, Now. She will be teaching a seminar using history for writing and healing at mystic-ink.com