Life and Background

Abstract

Passionate and intelligent, beautiful and gifted, warm, vital and responsive, Rosamond Lehmann resembled nothing so much as one of her own heroines. Her life story is told in oblique ways throughout her successive fictions of womanhood as they map out the territory for an expanding feminine consciousness on its journey of development through the twentieth century. It is always dangerous to try to draw exact correspondences between an author’s life and work, but the autobiographical basis of much of Lehmann’s writing is undeniable. As she remarked in old age,

so much of my ‘life story’ has gone, in various intricate disguises, and transmuted almost beyond my own recognition into my novels, that it would be difficult if not impossible to disentangle ‘true’ from ‘not true’; declare ‘This is pure invention, this partly happened, this very nearly happened, this did happen’ — even if I could conceive it to be a worth-while operation.¹