The Bride of Texas evokes a crowded mid-nineteenth-century panorama as it tells the story of a group of emigres who flee the oppression of the Hapsburg Empire and, in their pursuit of freedom and a better life, find themselves immersed in the chaos of an American war of emancipation. The kaleidoscopic drama is shaped by two parallel romances: Lida, the bride of the title, is a strong-willed young Czech woman who marries a plantation owner's son; her soldier brother, Cyril, falls in love with a young slave woman. And with them we are swept into a world at once unsentimental and romantic, in which love, challenged by racial and cultural boundaries, refuses to be easily snuffed out.