'A model of selection and compression  ... combines something of the earthiness of Colette with the imaginative insight of Virginia Woolf' Cyril Connolly

In Rosamond Lehmann's own words, The Swan in the Evening was 'my last testament. What else is left that I might say?' Written at the end of her life it is both the personal memoir of a great writer and a rare and important spiritual autobiography.

She starts by describing the child she was and the experiences which shaped her as a woman, moving on to tell of the birth of her beloved daughter Sally and the tragedy of her early death at the age of twenty-four. With enormous candour and insight, Rosamond Lehmann relates the totally unexpected psychic and mystical experiences she underwent after that terrible loss. The meaning of such events, their message of hope and comfort to others she then, through a letter to her granddaughter, passes on in these 'fragments of an inner life'.