Immobile Women in Rosamond Lehmann’s War Writing

Abstract

Whereas Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime protagonists tend to live as dangerously as she did among the bombs and rockets of battered London, Rosamond Lehmann’s characters typically live as safely as she did, evacuated to their country estates. Lehmann emphasizes their safety by setting some of her war writing in peacetime: the events of short stories such as “The Gipsy’s Baby” and “The Red-Haired Miss Daintreys” and the novel The Ballad and the Source (1944) all occur before the Second World War, and much of the action in The Echoing Grove (1953) also takes place either before or after the war. This difference in distance from the Blitz shaped the two writers’ fictional representations of the People’s War. Bowen’s upper-middle-class characters struggle to reconcile the privilege of a nostalgized past with the utopian promise of a postwar future. They therefore reveal a contradiction camouflaged by the rhetoric of the People’s War: rather than changing everything for everyone, the Blitz changed only some things for some people. Lehmann’s fiction more directly critiques the self-absorbed insularity of the upper-middle class. Although her characters often endorse the People’s War as vehemently as Bowen’s, they always do so at a safe distance from the Blitz itself; in The Echoing Grove, the characters think of the Blitz more as a metaphor for failed love than as a real catastrophe.