Abstract
The work of Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90) seems to have provoked until recently a consistently ambiguous and often patronising praise from reviewers and critics.1 Although she has been widely admired for her lucid and poetic prose style, the fact that her novels focus for the main part on the emotional life of her female protagonists has produced criticisms that they are ‘slight’ and ‘limited’, her first and arguably most popular novel, Dusty Answer (1927), being dismissed by one commentator as a ‘weightless nebulosity’ full of ‘self-admiring dilettantism’.2 Yet, as Gillian Tindall points out in her recent biography, such criticisms display, in themselves, a curious shortsightedness, ‘confusing circumspection of subject with a limitation of view’.3 There are, in fact, as other recent commentators have seen, strong grounds for claiming these ‘limitations’ as her strengths.4 Her novels are rich in psychological insight and succeed in portraying a universal as well as a very specific level of experienced reality.5 They do indeed focus on one particular aspect of existence, love and other strong emotional relationships, but these can hardly be deemed a minor part of human experience, as a vast amount of world literature throughout the ages testifies.
The fount of life — the source, the quick spring that rises in illimitable depths of darkness and flows through every living thing from generation to generation. It is what we feel mounting in us when we say: ‘I know! I love! I am!’ … Sometimes the source is vitiated, choked. Then people live frail, wavering lives, their roots cut off from what should nourish them. That is what happens to people when love is betrayed — murdered.
The Ballad and the Source
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Notes
The entry in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors. A Biographical Dictionary (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942), p. 809, quotes an interviewer’s description of Rosamond Lehmann as ‘the youngest and prettiest of British novelists’. Even the recent obituary notice in the Daily Telegraph (14 March 1990), p. 23, saw fit to remark that she craved admiration and ’was never convinced that her works received the recognition they deserved, nor her physical loveliness the homage that was its due’. It is inconceivable that such remarks would be made about a man.
J.W.H. Atkins, Six Novelists Look at Society (London: Calder, 1977), p. 118 and p. 128.
See also G. Dangerfield, ‘Rosamond Lehmann and the Perilous Enchantment of Things Past’, The Bookman, lxxvi (February 1933), p. 175: Her limitations have become strict and menacing — they are reminiscence, whimsy, delicacy, unfulfilment. Her memories of childhood and youth; her delight in the minor situation; her subservience to the commands of a beautiful prose style; her preoccupation with people, who by age or character, are incapable of full experience — these are the enchanted boundaries of her half-world; within these she works, and within these she may yet be imprisoned.’
Gillian Tindall, Rosamond Lehmann, An Appreciation ( London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth Press, 1985 ), p. 7.
See for example J. Giudin, ‘Rosamond Lehmann: A Revaluation’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 15, no. 2 (1974), pp. 203–11
W. Dorosz, ‘Subjective Vision and Human Relationships’ Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 23 (1975), pp. 9–135; as well as Tindall, Rosamond Lehmann. An Appreciation.
R.A. Scott-James, Fifty Years of English Literature ( London: Longman, 1961 ), p. 180. ‘Though complimentary about her style, he deems her ’not a considerable thinker, like Graham Greene’.
Dale Spender in There’s Always Been a Woman’s Movement this Century (London: Pandora, 1983) asserts that such an accusation was a common attempt to trivialise women’s writing, pp. 76–8.
Rosamond Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening (Fragments of an Inner Life ( London: Collins, 1967 ), p. 50
John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery: Autobiography I ( London: Longmans, Green, 1955 ), p. 24.
Biographical details can be found in Diana Le Stourgeon, Rosamond Lehmann, Twayne English Author Series, no. 16 ( Boston: Twayne, 1965 ).
John Lehmann, I am my Brother: Autobiography II ( London: Longmans, Green, 1960 ), p. 32.
Robert Hewison, Under Siege. Literary Life in London 1939–45, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 90–3, cites Elizabeth Bowen, L.P. Hartley, Evelyn Waugh and Joyce Carey as further examples.
Rosamond Lehmann, The Ballad and the Source ( London: Virago, 1984 ), p. 15. This is reminiscent of the mood of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’ in which a character complains that ’the source, the sap must have dried up, or the pulse must have stopped, before you or I were conceived’, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981 ), p. 683.
Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern ( London: Methuen, 1965 ), p. 130.
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© 1992 Penny Brown
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Brown, P. (1992). Rosamond Lehmann: Frail, Wavering Lives. In: The Poison at the Source. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373167_4
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