SOURCE: “Territorial Imperatives,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 15, Nos. 10–11, July, 1998, p. 28.

In the following review, Bauer praises Smiley's presentation of political commitment in The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

Jane Smiley's newest novel [The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton] plays continually with the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and history: sentimental passages, picaresque plots, direct addresses to the reader. Her heroine's adventures could even be said to start by revising Jane Eyre's confession, “Reader, I married him” as “Reader, I buried him.” Lidie's story begins with her marriage, not to a Byronic lover like Mr. Rochester, but rather to an abolitionist named Thomas Newton, who brings her to “bloody Kansas” in the 1850s when that territory was the site of fierce hostilities between abolitionists (also known as free-soilers) and pro-slavery frontiersmen.

Unlike the nineteenth-century novels that Smiley is adapting, however, marriage is not the...