I collect books set in my hometown of Cincinnati; my brother got me this one for Christmas, which I think he found in a used bookstore downtown. The novel is from 1992 and self-published, probably done on an early word processor, judging by the use of straight quotation marks. Also, like a lot of self-published books, it has weird book design, such as a cover blurb that actually gives away the entire plot of the book!
I am the only person on LibraryThing to own a copy, and though I am not a Goodreads person, it doesn't seem to me that anyone there has catalogued a copy either. The author, Lida Bell Lunt, was born in Cincinnati in 1908, and moved in the kind of social circles where you went to elite girls' boarding schools in Connecticut and had your engagement announced in the New York Times. She died in Rochester because that's where her husband was from, but seems to have maintained a life-long interest in the city of her birth. She died in 2004.
Victoria's Secret: Her Life by Lida Bell Lunt |
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Published: 1992 Acquired: December 2025 Read: August 2026 |
The book's main character is Victoria "Vicky" Miller, who seems to have been based upon a real person who was an ancestor of Lunt's, going by some comments she makes in her Acknowledgements. Vicky is an Irish girl who comes to Cincinnati in 1850 at the age of fifteen to live with some distant cousins; the book chronicles her life there up through the 1890s.
It is, alas, not very good. The central concept of the book is that her cousins are two brothers, Keith and Forrest. Keith is a dour, serious doctor; Forrest is a lively cad. Forrest flirts outrageously with Vicky when she arrives in the U.S., and though they don't actually have sex, they do everything but. Only once she makes it to the brothers' home does Vicky discover that Forrest is in fact married. She settles into their household, helping Keith with his medical practice while trying to stay out of the way of Forrest's jealous wife. Eventually the Civil War breaks out; before Forrest leaves for battle, he and Vicky finally have sex. She ends up pregnant, of course, and Keith marries her to preserve the family honor, especially once Forrest deserts. She and Keith have a fraught relationship: she gradually falls in love with him, but he doesn't want to have sex with her. They eventually do, though then there's some marital rape later on as well. Finally they reconcile, and live together until Keith dies. Once Forrest's wife dies (who is revealed to have engineered the death of Keith and Forrest's mother in a failed attempt to be with Keith), Vicky and Keith can finally get married.
Whew! It's quite a soap opera, as you can see. The problem is that it's not very clear what Vicky sees in either Forrest or Keith. I get that people like this exist, but Lunt lacks the skill of a writer to pull this off; Vicky just seems swept along in her body's need for hot sex. Her attempt to portray Vicky's love for both Keith and Forrest as great romantic stuff just does not succeed. And the making of of Forrest's wife into a villain very much grates, as this is a woman who has been legitimately wrong time and again! Sometimes it seems like the editing is off, like Vicky suddenly realizes Keith and Forrest's wife have a thing for each other... several chapters after she saw them canoodling and got so mad she temporarily left Keith, like Lunt totally forgot about the previous incident.
My main reason for reading this book, though, is not literary merit per se, but interest in seeing how my beloved hometown is depicted. Lunt clearly is very into Cincinnati; unfortunately, this manifests in periodic bits where something happens to show She Did Her Research, like totally irrelevant exposition about how Ohioans came to be known as "buckeyes" or a bit where people tell the story about how one of the first c-sections was performed in the area or lots of information about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family. That said, as a Miami University alumnus, I was appreciative of the mention of the Western Female Seminary!
(From some quick research, it does seem to technically be possible, but the idea of "Keith" as a nineteenth-century given name just jarred.)
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