{"id":110198,"date":"2017-04-25T11:01:47","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T15:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110198"},"modified":"2017-04-25T13:57:24","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T17:57:24","slug":"rosamond-lehmann-literary-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann\u2019s first novel, Dusty Answer<\/i>, they had modest hopes of its success. Young authors and tales of youthful experience dominated the market at the time, a craze sparked by Alec Waugh\u2019s autobiographical best seller The Loom of Youth<\/i>, published in 1917, when he was nineteen. And twenty-six-year-old Lehmann had written a book \u201cof decided quality,\u201d thought Chatto director Harold Raymond, who nevertheless told her that they didn\u2019t expect to make any money. The novel received a few reviews following its publication at the end of April 1927. \u201cThis is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time,\u201d said The\u00a0<\/em>Spectator<\/i>. \u201cBut the story is too sad for popular taste.\u201d Such an assessment was, it seemed, borne out by the less-than-brisk sales. Then a week later, the Sunday Times<\/i> ran a review by the poet and critic Alfred Noyes, who was an old friend of Lehmann\u2019s father\u2019s, and whose praise was the stuff of debut novelists\u2019 dreams:<\/p>\n

It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation \u2026 The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The world took notice, and an overnight literary phenomenon was born. During the summer of 1927, a whirlwind of publicity enveloped Lehmann, to her amazement and mild chagrin. \u201cIt\u2019s rather terrifying somehow,\u201d she confided to Raymond, \u201cwhen a thing you have made yourself, very privately, becomes so very public.\u201d In September, Henry Holt & Company published the novel in the United States, where it was a Book of the Month Club choice. Not all critics, however, were as rhapsodic as Noyes. Leonard Woolf\u2019s Nation<\/i> and Athenaeum<\/i> review chastised the author for her \u201cclumsiness and lack of economy,\u201d which \u201cso often accompanies freshness and exuberance in the work of inexperienced novelists.\u201d Yet neither these alleged shortcomings nor the story\u2019s melancholy deterred readers. On both sides of the Atlantic, Dusty Answer<\/i>\u2014written, according to Lehmann, \u201crapidly, with extreme diligence, with scarcely an erasure\u201d\u2014was a runaway best seller that became a classic of women\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n

On its ninetieth anniversary, Dusty Answer<\/i> has lost none of its power to enrapture. The novel\u2019s epigraph, a couplet from George Meredith\u2019s sonnet sequence Modern Love<\/i>\u2014\u201cAh, what a dusty answer gets the soul \/ When hot for certainties in this our life!\u201d\u2014sets up the sustained and beguiling register of wistfulness that singularizes Lehmann\u2019s portrayal, light on dramatic incident, of a privileged young woman\u2019s sentimental education.<\/p>\n

Dreamy and academically gifted, Judith Earle spends her lonely childhood and adolescence fixating on the Fyfe cousins\u2014four boys and a girl\u2014who intermittently stay at their grandmother\u2019s house \u201cover the peach-tree wall\u201d in an idyllic stretch of the Thames Valley. The Fyfes are aristocratic, confident, and burnished with a kind of otherworldly charisma, and to Judith they represent nothing less than the ever-elusive possibility of happiness. Her \u201cimmoderate\u201d ambition is that one day \u201cthey would all like her better than anyone else \u2026 Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious, would revolve intimately around her.\u201d But the reader already knows this cannot happen: we\u2019re told on the first page that golden-haired Charlie, the object of Judith\u2019s most ardent childhood fantasies, is killed as a nineteen-year-old soldier. And while all three surviving boys are destined to love her, each relationship is, in its own way, abortive.<\/p>\n

When Judith goes up to Cambridge, the Fyfes\u2019 spell is temporarily weakened by her infatuation with a classmate, the \u201cglorious Pagan\u201d Jennifer Baird. The girls\u2019 intense friendship, erotically charged if not actually physical, sends Judith into reveries of delight. \u201cIt was impossible to drink up enough of her,\u201d she thinks, \u201cand a day without her was a day with the light gone.\u201d In the marriage plot\u2013subverting 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 \u201cheavy and masculine\u201d jaw and who \u201csmokes like a man.\u201d 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. \u201cDidn\u2019t I say,\u201d he tells her, \u201cthat I was never to be taken seriously?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Lehmann\u2019s honest depiction of same-sex attraction and dead-end heterosexual liaisons scandalized large sections of the public. \u201cBefore consigning your book to flames,\u201d advised one letter among hundreds, \u201cwould wish to inform you of my disgust that anyone should pen such filth, especially a MISS.\u201d Other responses were both more positive and more alarming, such as the 200,000-word sequel to Dusty Answer <\/i>that Lehmann received from a \u201cyoung Frenchman,\u201d along with \u201cphotographs and letters designed to prepare me for our joint future, when he would teach me love.\u201d In the Evening Standard<\/i>, meanwhile, an article headlined \u201cThe Perils of Youth\u201d charged Dusty Answer<\/i> and The Loom of Youth<\/i> with corrupting young people, who were urged to employ the remedy of \u201csilence and self control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehmann hadn\u2019t set out to offend or titillate or make a political statement. Yet she found herself alternately applauded as a feminist rebel\u2014in her words, \u201ca stripper of the veils of reticence\u201d\u2014and censured for indecency. \u201cIt seems comical in retrospect,\u201d she later wrote, \u201cthat this impassioned but idealistic piece of work should have shocked a great many readers: but it did. It was discussed, and even reviewed, in certain quarters as the outpourings of a sex-maniac.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the outcry, Dusty Answer<\/i> escaped any legal stricture, which was by no means a foregone conclusion given the attitudes of the era. It was only twelve years earlier that D. H. Lawrence\u2019s The Rainbow<\/i> was banned, with the novel\u2019s brief lesbian scene given special condemnation in court. And in 1928, all copies of Radclyffe Hall\u2019s \u201cinvert novel,\u201d The Well of Loneliness<\/i>, were ordered destroyed by a judge. Hall herself pointed out that Dusty Answer<\/i> features a lesbian \u201cepisode,\u201d and, after the Well of Loneliness<\/i> trial, the earlier novel was talked about as a forerunner to Hall\u2019s. Nowadays often classified as a lesbian novel, Dusty Answer<\/i> was number four on the Guardian<\/i>\u2019s list last year of the top ten landmarks in gay and lesbian literature, as compiled by the poet and gay-studies scholar Gregory Wood. \u201cWith no axe to grind,\u201d he declared, \u201cit barely distinguishes between hetero and homo.\u201d It\u2019s an appraisal Lehmann probably would have appreciated, even though in her opinion too much emphasis was put on the sapphic undertones of the Cambridge chapters. As far as she was concerned, Jennifer and Judith\u2019s attachment was simply a portrait of her own close but innocent college friendships.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> Art of Fiction interview<\/a>, Lehmann said that when writing the book, \u201cI 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\u2019t bear her.\u201d In an earlier essay she decried the character, \u201cone of my sub-selves,\u201d as \u201cembarrassingly vulnerable, self-absorbed, glamorised.\u201d For one\u2019s gauche young self to be so vividly immortalized must be excruciating; Lehmann\u2019s disavowal is understandable. Yet as a work of literature, Dusty Answer<\/i> is far from embarrassing. Judith\u2019s hopeful romanticism\u2014and the unabashed romanticism of the lush, lyrical prose\u2014is 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\u2019s end: \u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable, <\/em>Longreads, <\/em>Newsweek, <\/em>The Daily Beast, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Awl, <\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann\u2019s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success. Young authors and tales of youthful experience dominated the market at the time, a craze sparked by Alec Waugh\u2019s autobiographical best seller The Loom of Youth, published in 1917, when he was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[21658,28493,11607,1016,24874,28492,1760,28490,1102,28494,28497,28499,3094,28496,28495,17079,1741,23921,28489,3400,23169,28491,28498,23920],"class_list":["post-110198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alec-waugh","tag-alfred-noyes","tag-anniversary","tag-art-of-fiction","tag-book-of-the-month","tag-chatto-windus","tag-d-h-lawrence","tag-dusty-answer","tag-feminism","tag-george-meredith","tag-geraldine-manners","tag-gregory-wood","tag-harold-doc-humes","tag-jennifer-baird","tag-judith-earle","tag-leonard-woolf","tag-lesbians","tag-radclyffe-hall","tag-rosamond-lehmann","tag-sonnet","tag-thames","tag-the-loom-of-youth","tag-the-rainbow","tag-the-well-of-loneliness"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRosamond Lehmann, Literary Star by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 25, 2017 \u2013   In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann\u2019s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star by Emma Garman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 25, 2017 \u2013   In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann\u2019s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-04-25T15:01:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-04-25T17:57:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lehmann-final-e1493046096857.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"684\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"451\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Emma Garman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Emma Garman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Emma Garman\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/7cf3b32183da239f23c45d5821f1b9bb\"},\"headline\":\"Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-04-25T15:01:47+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-04-25T17:57:24+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/\"},\"wordCount\":1450,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/rosamond-lehmann-literary-star\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lehmann-final-e1493046096857.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Alec Waugh\",\"Alfred Noyes\",\"anniversary\",\"Art of Fiction\",\"book of the month\",\"Chatto & Windus\",\"D. 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