Realism and Reality

Abstract

‘This might be the line to pursue: to see one reality and turn it inside out again and again, making of one many, and all conflicting; and ending with a question mark.’ So reflects a character in A Note in Music (p. 153), neatly summarising the technique that underlies the novel. The focus on subjective experience that dominates Lehmann’s writing in all its forms inevitably invites a questioning of the concept of objective truth, but it is not until Rosamond Lehmann’s last two major fictional works, The Ballad and the Source and The Echoing Grove, that this questioning becomes the central matter of the piece in question. As The Ballad and the Source indicates, with its dazzling maze of narratives overlaid one against the other, story-telling is a mechanism that helps to stimulate the act of memory and simultaneously exposes us to the confusing nature of events and their interpretation. The Echoing Grove, by taking a crucial episode in the lives of three characters and by retelling the story from each of their perspectives, reinforces and extends that confusion. It differs considerably from The Ballad and the Source by shifting attention from the theatricality of presentation that sets the tone for the earlier novel to a much more realistic and searching analysis of personality, psychological motivation and human failing.