Rosamond Lehmann: A Life

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Part Two. Judith realises the Fyfe cousins have returned to the house next door during a midnight swim in the river which joins both gardens . After days spent dancing, playing the piano and getting to know her neighbours again an unexpected telegram arrives form her mother in Paris.

Lehmann's two younger siblings were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Her younger sister Beatrix Lehmann (1903–1979), became an actress; her younger brother, John Lehmann (1907–1987), a writer and publisher. [8] Purportedly, Rosamond's father favoured Beatrix and her mother favoured John, leaving Rosamond feeling neglected. Because of this, supposedly, she turned to writing. [9] Winsloe, Christa, Mädchen in Uniform (Schoolgirls in Uniform), a play and later a film about a girls' school run on militaristic lines, where only the love between one teacher and her pupils counters the institution's brutalism.It is also a work with a hyperabundance of description of the natural world, and use of the pathetic fallacy, where non-human objects are portrayed as reflecting human emotions. Judith is sometimes unaware whether or not she speaks aloud or is heard. She makes disastrous mistakes based on what she thinks is real rather than on what is actually happening around her, causing grave misunderstandings to arise. However, Alison told us, this dual self composed of Judith's actual and imaginative selves is a sign of her status as a burgeoning author.

Rosamond had her heart broken at Cambridge (Twenties Girton is perfectly described) by her favourite type, a cool, dashing Etonian, and made a disastrous marriage on the rebound to Leslie Runciman, of a tough Methodist ship-owning family. 'Our sex life was a disgrace to sex,' she wrote later. As he had a neurotic horror of having children, she had a traumatic abortion. This was what she would call, snootily, her 'bleak period of exile in the detested North of England', in Liverpool and Newcastle. (It provided powerful material, 'far from gay', for her second novel, A Note in Music ). She escaped by writing her first book, Dusty Answer , a hugely successful story of thwarted young love, and through a love affair with the alluring upper-class painter, Wogan Phillips, whom she married after a long battle for divorce. Alain-Fournier', Le Grand Meaulnes (1913); childhood recalled through the evocation of 'the lost domain' of a near-magical French estate. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

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Part Three. Judith arrives in Cambridge and can't find her room. She wonders how she will settle down but soon meets fellow student Jennifer who is to become a great friend. During the winter snow, Roddy comes to visit ... Much worse was to come. Although Lehmann's romantic disappointments had led to excessive self-absorption, she was still able, on occasion, to stand beyond them and to channel them into her increasingly sporadic work. Love affairs may have broken her heart, but they also gave her work the understanding that encouraged similarly afflicted women to write to her in droves. Maybe my favorite part of Lehmann’s novels is the really special and particular way of she draws out her characters and brings them to life - their dialogues, their little actions and quirks and detachment, that make them so charming, even with all their flaws.

Lehmann’s writing is beautiful, and her physical and emotional landscapes are captured perfectly. From the beginning we are absorbed into Judith’s hopes and dreams, and feel every moment of joy and pain. It’s slightly puzzling how such intensity and awkwardness can be maintained in a character without becoming tiresome, but Lehmann cleverly moves her setting and characters around so that Judith is always moving forward, however clumsily, towards self-awareness and maturity.Not surprisingly, Lehmann’s honest depiction of same-sex attraction and dead-end heterosexual liaisons scandalized large sections of the public. “Before consigning your book to flames,” advised one letter among hundreds, “would wish to inform you of my disgust that anyone should pen such filth, especially a MISS.” Other responses were both more positive and more alarming, such as the 200,000-word sequel to Dusty Answer that Lehmann received from a “young Frenchman,” along with “photographs and letters designed to prepare me for our joint future, when he would teach me love.” In the Evening Standard, meanwhile, an article headlined “The Perils of Youth” charged Dusty Answer and The Loom of Youth with corrupting young people, who were urged to employ the remedy of “silence and self control.”