Rosamond Lehmann: A Life

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The ties between all the characters, the tragedy of resignation and fear (the fear of opening your heart to anybody), the burden of untelling feelings and desires, the weight of death and memories, make this book one of the greatest I have ever read. (less) [edit]

The Swan in the Evening (1967) is an autobiography which Lehmann described as her "last testament". In it, she intimately describes the emotions she felt at the birth of her daughter Sally, and also when Sally died abruptly of poliomyelitis at the age of 23 (or 24) in 1958 while in Jakarta. She never recovered from Sally's death. Lehmann claimed to have had some psychic experiences, documented in Moments of Truth. Lehmann came from a family with a strong literary and artistic strain. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a writer, editor and Liberal MP who co-founded The Granta magazine and contributed to Punch. Her brother John worked at Hogarth Press with Leonard Woolf while her sister Beatrix was a notable actor and author. Rosamond was an alumna of Girton College, Cambridge, which plays a key part in the novel. She drew admiring words from Virginia Woolf, who praised "her clear hard mind beating up now & again to poetry" ( Diary, August 28 1930).Lehmann's marriage with Phillips fell apart during the late 1930s, after Phillips left for Spain during the Spanish Civil War to support the anti-fascist cause. The separation, and Lehmann's affair with the journalist Goronwy Rees, led the two to divorce in 1944. [1] [2] Judith Earle grows up in rural England with mostly indifferent parents who homeschool her. In the house next door, a group of cousins comes periodically to stay with their grandmother. The Fyfe children, Roddy, Julian, Charles, Martin and Mariella, absorb and enchant Judith’s life and daydreams, unbeknownst to them. The passages in the beginning of the novel float in a realm of memory and obsession:

Qualcosa s’era messo in moto… Julian era venuto a evocare ombre davanti e dietro di sé. Il passato ribolliva: l’antica malattia di ricordare stava per riprendere. E non una luce in prospettiva. Con la scrittura. Il suo talento. Le descrizioni che nel senso migliore del termine sono spesso pittoriche. Con la sua attenzione per luci, colori, sfumature vegetali, profumi, la conca della notte, la bellezza della sua lingua. Judith is, indeed, a lightly fictionalized version of the author, or at least of the author as she was as a young woman. In her 1985 Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, Lehmann said that when writing the book, “I lived in a sort of trance and identified with Judith, the heroine, who is a lonely, romantic girl living in a dream. Now I find Judith far too sappy and overly romanticized. I can’t bear her.” In an earlier essay she decried the character, “one of my sub-selves,” as “embarrassingly vulnerable, self-absorbed, glamorised.” For one’s gauche young self to be so vividly immortalized must be excruciating; Lehmann’s disavowal is understandable. Yet as a work of literature, Dusty Answer is far from embarrassing. Judith’s hopeful romanticism—and the unabashed romanticism of the lush, lyrical prose—is countervailed by an all too clear-eyed message: that love means pain, and that from our inescapable aloneness comes strength. As Judith thinks at her story’s end: “She was rid at last of the weakness, the futile obsession of dependence on other people. She had nobody but herself now, and that was best.”Anni Venti: Rosamond Lehmann con il fratello John e Lytton Strachey. La Lehmann, pur non facendone mai parte, frequentò il gruppo di Bloomsbury, e fu amica di Virginia e Leonard Woolf.