'She is immensely readable, acute, passionate,
funny and original' Elizabeth Jane Howard
Dusty Answer is Judith Earle's story. In breathless, elegiac prose it tells
of her solitary childhood spent dreaming in an enchanted house by the river, her
awkward, intense experiences at Cambridge, her first, passionate friendship with
a contemporary, her stunned disillusionment. Above all, the novel is about Judith's
consuming relationship with the Fyfes, a family of cousins whose inroads into
the dreams and preoccupations of her young womanhood make Dusty Answer
subtle, heartbreaking, and a landmark in English fiction.
Read an extract from The Swan in the Evening
about Dusty Answer
'It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner
life for the time it takes to read' Jonathan Coe
'She makes a mood, an atmosphere,
which is only hers, and is never forgotten ... the inner voice
of women talking to themselves about their love affairs, knowing that it's
hopeless, having to go ahead anyway, expecting the end as soon as it begins.
That, of course, is what Rosamond Lehmann does best' Sunday Times
Two sisters: Madeleine and Dinah. One husband: Rickie Masters. For many years
now, Dinah, exotic and sensual, has conducted a clandestine affair with Rickie;
Madeleine, calm and resolute, has accepted that her marriage has been of limited
success. Rickie's sudden death makes widows of both sisters in this highly
imaginative novel which explores with extraordinary insight the sublimity,
the rivalry and the pain of personal relationships.
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'A novelist in the grand tradition,
and, more than this, an innovator, the first writer to filter her stories through
a woman's feelings and perceptions' Anita Brookner
In a home-made dress of flame-coloured silk, a gawky, would-be curate as an
escort, Olivia Curtis's first dance is either going to be gloriously romantic
or an agonizing public humiliation. But whatever it entails it has to be an
improvement on the Sheer Ordinariness of normal life. With insight and subtlety,
Rosamond Lehmann explores the trepidation of a young girl's entry into the adult
world and the shadows lurking at even the most innocent of social events.
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'A novel of tenderness . . . Lehmann
explores the deep recesses of people's private lives' Janet Watts
Taking up where An Invitation to the Waltz left off, this novel gives
us Olivia Curtis ten years older: thinner, sadder, and apparently not much
wiser. A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager
leads to a forbidden love affair and a new world of secret meetings, brief
phone calls and snatched liaisons in anonymous hotel rooms.
Years ahead of its time when first published, this subtle and powerful novel
shocked even the most stalwart Lehmann fans with its searing honesty and passionate
portrayal of clandestine love.
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'She is immensely readable, acute,
passionate, funny and original' Elizabeth Jane Howard
Grace Fairfax lives with her dull, conventional husband Tom in a grey manufacturing
town in the north of England. At thirty-four she finds that her external life
of dreary routine fails to match up to her lush, wistful and dreamy internal
life. Norah, her energetic and chaotic friend, is equally settled in her own
marriage to an irritable university professor. Then Hugh Miller and his sister
Claire descend upon the quiet town. On all four, the hypnotic charm of these
two visitors exerts an enchanting spell. And after their departure, life -
having been violently disrupted ~ will never be quite the same again ...
'She uses words with the enjoyment and mastery with
which Renoir used to paint' Rebecca West
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In these captivating short stories we find perfect miniatures
of Rosamond Lehmann's fictional world. Echoing the themes which permeate her
finest fiction, here are delicate portrayals of the world of adults as seen
through the eyes of curious children, fascination with different families
~ their otherness, the romance of their separate worlds. Most moving are the
stories set against the background of Britain at war: the world of women and
children, the minutiae of daily life in rural England ~ are all recorded with
unmatched sensitivity and precision. First published in 1946, these beautifully
crafted stories demonstrate the genius and subtlety of Rosamond Lehmann.
'All of them display a mastery of the craft of short
story narration' Irish Independent
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'I cannot doubt that this is Miss
Lehmann's best and most permanent book' Raymond Mortimer
Ten-year-old Rebecca is living in the country with her family when Sibyl Jardine,
an enigmatic and powerful old woman, returns to the neighbourhood. The two families,
once linked in the past, meet again, with Rebecca gradually becoming drawn into
the strange complications of the old lady's life. Through the spellbound eyes
of the young girl we enter into an intricate and scandalous family history ~
involving Mrs Jardine's husband, her errant daughter and her grandchildren ~
and slowly the story of a passionate, stormy life unfolds. Bewitching, hypnotic,
sibylline ~ both sweet and savage, both saint and sinner ~ Sibyl Jardine is
Rosamond Lehmann's most formidable literary creation.
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'Lehmann has always written brilliantly
of women in love, of mothers and daughters' Margaret Drabble
It is 1933 and we re-meet Rebecca ~ heroine of The Ballad and the Source
~ in a different world, on many levels. Betrayed by her married lover, Rebecca
arrives alone at a small Caribbean island. Here she meets the splendidly eccentric
members of the island's British expatriate colony, and the former ace pilot
Johnny, crippled now, a misanthropic recluse in his beach hut. Here too she
encounters voices from the past, and the vibrant spirit of Sibyl Jardine ~ voices
which remind Rebecca of the girl she was and the woman she could become. But
will she remain entangled with the ghosts of former lives or allow a passionate
affair the chance to show her the powerful life-force love can be?
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© Copyright
Virago Press 2001