Rau, Petra. "Rosamond Lehmann". The Literary Encyclopedia. Ed. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd.

The Child Manuela (1934); the novel of the play (there is a Virago Lesbian Landmarks edition with an introduction by Alison Hennegan). Stein, Gertrude, Fernhurst (1903, there was a Virago Lesbian Landmarks reprint with an introduction by Alison Hennegan, and various other editions are available); novel based on a scandal at Bryn Mawr, the highly-regarded American women's college. Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999.

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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: Part One sees Judith reminiscing about her childhood where the seeds of her strong friendship with the cousins are laid. Many years have passed and the cousins return in adolescence for an atmospheric day of skating on the pond. Lui si accese una sigaretta, e a denti stretti, fissando l'erba disse: - Con tutto questo, cosa cerchi di farmi capire? Che hai cambiato idea e vuoi rimangiarti la tua promessa? Lehmann's two younger siblings were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Her younger sister Beatrix Lehmann (1903–1979), became an actress; her younger brother, John Lehmann (1907–1987), a writer and publisher. [8] Purportedly, Rosamond's father favoured Beatrix and her mother favoured John, leaving Rosamond feeling neglected. Because of this, supposedly, she turned to writing. [9]

La critica dell’epoca più che altro lo stroncò. E anche questo repêchage della Einaudi (Stile Libero) non mi pare abbia suscitato critiche e commenti entusiastici.In 1919, she attended the Cambridge-based Girton College where she graduated with a degree in English. Lehmann penned “Dusty Answer” her debut novel in 1927 and while it initially had a mixed reception, it would soon turn into a bestselling title.

When Judith goes up to Cambridge, the Fyfes’ spell is temporarily weakened by her infatuation with a classmate, the “glorious Pagan” Jennifer Baird. The girls’ intense friendship, erotically charged if not actually physical, sends Judith into reveries of delight. “It was impossible to drink up enough of her,” she thinks, “and a day without her was a day with the light gone.” In the marriage plot–subverting narrative scheme, a platonic romance carries the same emotional weight as one that might lead to a wedding, and is the source of equal disillusionment. After the second year of college, Jennifer takes up with an older woman named Geraldine Manners, a stereotypical lesbian with short hair and a “heavy and masculine” jaw and who “smokes like a man.” Judith is left devastated, and vulnerable once again to the solicitations of the Fyfes, in particular Roddy: offhand, cryptic, and himself tacitly involved in a gay affair. She loses her virginity to him and declares her love and commitment, only to be rebuffed in the most painful fashion. “Didn’t I say,” he tells her, “that I was never to be taken seriously?” Lehmann's autobiographical work, The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967), was written at a time when her faith in a consciousness that survives bodily death was finally beginning to still "this painful business", as, in the book, she called the tumult of her life on this planet. The tales convey little of this stage of Lehmann's emotional and spiritual development directly, but the seeds of it are everywhere, not least in the vital scrutiny of the duty and craft of the writer, the essential surrender that she must undergo. "Writers should stay more patiently at the centre and suffer themselves to be worked upon," she declares in the oddly self-reflexive story "The Red-haired Miss Daintreys". That seems to be of a piece with the impression given by these stories of the world's friability, the suggestion that another realm awaits behind this prone-to-crumbling veneer. Take this passage from the horrific little story "A Dream of Winter":On the big day, she wakes up and is handed a beautiful scarlet fabric that she is supposed to make a dress with for the dance. She is also given a diary, a ten shilling note, and from her little brother an ugly little ornament. a b "Rosamond Nina Lehmann" in the 1911 England Census (Class: RG14; Piece: 7895; Schedule Number: 238) Pero Roddy, realmente..., realmente me estás hablando de una de esas convenciones anticuadas... En verdad, una mujer tiene todo el derecho del mundo a decir que... que quiere a un hombre... si lo desea... Es una mera cuestión de valor... ." In 1919 she went to Girton College, University of Cambridge to read English Literature, an unusual thing for a woman to do at that time. In December 1923 she married Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford) (1900-1989), and the couple went to live in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1927 and were divorced later that year. Lehmann's novel The Weather in the Streets (1936) was made into a film in 1983, which starred Michael York and Joanna Lumley.

Only a handful of authors can write in a way where, though I know a character is in the wrong or being completely illogical, I feel what they’re feeling, hate who they hate, like who they like.E credo la dica lunga sul ‘lavoro’ che Ernaux si appresta a fare, quel suo viaggio indietro nella memoria. The three books I’ve read by Lehmann all seem to focus on characters who never quite get what they want - outsiders, loners, people looking but never really finding. Also, like in “A Note In Music”, I was pleasantly surprised by the queer, ambiguous relationships and undertones. This is not to say that she is a terrible person; I do not think she is, just young and without any grounding -- she has some rules to get by on, but no idea what the rules are for, what it is that they are supposed to be guiding her towards and protecting her (and others) from. In the days leading up to the ball, she will need to get her dress made and things are going according to plan. She is anticipating the arrival of Reggies who will go with the two sisters to the ball. For years he shuttled between glamorous Rosamond and his country-mouse wife Mary, hinting at jam tomorrow; when he eventually absconded with the actress Jill Balcon, Lehmann was driven, more or less, to madness. A vengeful victim, she harried her numerous friends - Elizabeth Bowen, Frances Partridge and Laurie Lee among them - half to death, pleading with them to intervene on her behalf, to choose their side, or simply to listen to endless self-pitying rants. Those less directly involved were delighted with the spectacle: Edith Sitwell enquired into the state of play with a gleeful "O I must tell Osbert!"