3 - Modernity, Femininity and Culture: The Weather in the Streets

Summary

It has been said that for Rosamond Lehmann falling in love was a vocation. In an article in The Sunday Telegraph, Selina Hastings wrote movingly of Lehmann's beauty, her many lovers and her irresistible attraction to charming cads – Leslie, Wogan, Goronwy, Cecil, Jim – who in one way or another broke her heart. Her charismatic father, Rudie Lehmann, was the first of her passions. Watching his 8-year-old daughter at play, he noticed how ‘she longs for affection & expands under its glow’, but his tragic decline as a result of Parkinson's disease put a premature end to any enduring relationship. At 18, she caught the eye of the handsome Ivo Grenfell, an attraction that was nipped in the bud by his mother, Lady Desborough, later reincarnated as the formidable Lady Spencer in both Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets. At university, on the rebound from humiliating rejection by David Keswick, she fell for Leslie Runciman, and when that marriage collapsed, she turned to successive, unreliable lovers for the grand passions that serially sustained her. One by one her male companions discarded her, often for other women. Lehmann never forgave their desertion. ‘I select love-objects who must bring me to disaster’, she confided to George Rylands. After her death, her close friend and confidant, James Lees-Milne, explained how the unrestrained emotion that gave life to her fiction in reality translated into an exacting possessiveness.

Whereas her mental discipline, controlling her extraordinary imagination, fashioned her books into works of art, the emotions with which her affections were charged destroyed, in a sense, her loves. She was overwhelming in her demands and proprietary in their realisation. In love she played no gentle solo. She gave vent like a full orchestra to a resounding symphony of sound and fury. These performances led to chaos, the terror of her partners and their ultimate escape which was often covert, abrupt and unkind.

By 1934, the point at which Lehmann started in earnest on The Weather in the Streets, her second marriage, which had begun in such a whirlwind of infatuation, was under strain, with both partners involved in extra-marital relationships. In that year too she began an intense affair with her old friend, Matt Ridley, generally assumed to be the model for the novel's anti-hero, Rollo Spencer.