Introduction

Summary

‘I wish I were a writer’, confesses Hugh Miller impulsively in A Note in Music (1930). ‘Sort of get things out of oneself couldn't one?’(NiM, 177). Rosamond Lehmann's fiction gives voice to the deepest of intimate experiences, powerful, secret and often painful. When Sibyl Jardine, that supreme teller of tales in The Ballad and the Source (1944) concedes that, ‘Truth is my foible’, the voice could be Lehmann's own. Friend and fellow novelist, Anita Brookner, observed that Lehmann's ‘greatest attribute is her straightforwardness, her candour’. Emotional honesty was at the heart of her appeal, one reason her books resonated with readers across generations. ‘Miss Lehmann. How did you know? – This is my story exactly!’ (WS, introduction), enthused women fans. Equally, as a sophisticated exponent of late modernism, Lehmann was insistent that she wrote ‘to show there is not one truth about anything’. Her fiction lays bare its emotional centre in an extraordinarily personal way as it dissects a society struggling to come to terms with a world of conflicting imperatives. At the same time her storytelling is always immediate, engaging and often hilarious. Simultaneously subjective and ironic, anti-establishment and traditional, ethereal and pragmatic, her writing displays the contradictory impulses that bridge the gap between the mainstream narrative tradition and a twentieth-century modernist consciousness.

Lehmann's literary reputation rests on six major novels whose strong subject matter frequently exposed her to the charge of emotional excess. Such was their impact that she was acclaimed internationally as ‘the greatest living novelist’ and ‘a genius to be compared with Tolstoy’. Although some critics, both at the time and subsequently, found it tempting to classify Lehmann as a ‘women's novelist’, her rarified sensibility ‘almost too femininely subtle and shifting’, such categorization is simplistic. As a contemporary reviewer noted, ‘Rosamond Lehmann is of course a woman. All the major characters of her story are women. Women will be its most passionate readers. Men … yet recognize that rare phenomenon: a distinguished novel which might have been written a decade ago, and that will be as intriguing a decade hence.’ Whilst her books’ exploration of feminine psychology was unparallelled, to fix their scrutiny of twentieth-century society to just one of its many dimensions ignores the wider resonance of the work, which unpicks the fabric of modern life to reveal the troubled psyche within.