"Dusty Answer, my first novel, uncorked a torrent of letters, literally hundreds of
letters ~ chiefly from America in the beginning, later chiefly from
France ~ explaining that I had written their own unhappy love story:
how could I possibly have known or guessed it? More than one lesbian
lady urged me to abandon my so obviously frustrated heterosexual life
and share her hearth and home. One young Frenchman withdrew to a
mountain-top and there typed out a two hundred thousand word sequel to Dusty Answer,
accompanied by photographs and letters designed to prepare me for our
joint future, when he would teach me love. And so it went on, with
twists and variations which it might be tedious to multiply. It was one
of those curious, unaccountable explosions of zeitgeist".
So wrote Rosamund Lehmann in her autobiography, The Swan in the Evening, from which you can read an extract here.
Dusty Answer is an astonishing first novel. Lehmann wrote it in 1927, when she was in her early twenties, unhappily married and uncertain what to do with her life. The young heroine, Judith Earle, is similarly uncertain. The novel follows her from her childhood, when, in her pleasant, cultured, middle-class home by a river, she is entranced by the rather older children who sometimes stay next door with their grandmother: "stupid, funny, serious Martin", beautiful Charlie, sarcastic, clever Julian, attractive, mercurial Roddy, and Mariella, the only girl, "remote and unruffled, coolly friendly". After the first world war, Judith, now a young adult, meets them again, by which time Charlie has been killed in the war, first having married Mariella, who is now bringing up their baby son Peter. The story now follows Judith through her three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she becomes involved in an intense relationship with the beautiful, wild Jennifer Baird. Flung into despair at the ending of that relationship, when Jennifer abandons her for the unsympathetic, domineering lesbian Geraldine Manners, Judith becomes involved, one after another, with all three of the surviving young men. All three involvements end badly. After an idyllic night with Roddy, she writes to him expressing her undying love, only to find he had seen their night together as a passing diversion. Devastated, and unable to forget Roddy, she agrees to marry Martin, but realises in time that she cannot go through with it, and breaks the engagement. Julian, who has always been in love with her, now proposes that she should become his mistress, but though she initially agrees, this relationship too ends when it is revealed that Martin has been drowned at sea. Judith is left alone at the end, "a person whose whole past had made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded. Soon she must begin to think: What next? But not quite yet".
All this may sound very intense and breathless, and in truth it is. But it is so astonishingly perceptive, so acute in its observation of people, and their feelings, and the way they relate to each other. And Lehmann writes so superbly: her descriptions of the natural world are wonderful. Here's just one taster to finish with:
"It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay".
So wrote Rosamund Lehmann in her autobiography, The Swan in the Evening, from which you can read an extract here.
Dusty Answer is an astonishing first novel. Lehmann wrote it in 1927, when she was in her early twenties, unhappily married and uncertain what to do with her life. The young heroine, Judith Earle, is similarly uncertain. The novel follows her from her childhood, when, in her pleasant, cultured, middle-class home by a river, she is entranced by the rather older children who sometimes stay next door with their grandmother: "stupid, funny, serious Martin", beautiful Charlie, sarcastic, clever Julian, attractive, mercurial Roddy, and Mariella, the only girl, "remote and unruffled, coolly friendly". After the first world war, Judith, now a young adult, meets them again, by which time Charlie has been killed in the war, first having married Mariella, who is now bringing up their baby son Peter. The story now follows Judith through her three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she becomes involved in an intense relationship with the beautiful, wild Jennifer Baird. Flung into despair at the ending of that relationship, when Jennifer abandons her for the unsympathetic, domineering lesbian Geraldine Manners, Judith becomes involved, one after another, with all three of the surviving young men. All three involvements end badly. After an idyllic night with Roddy, she writes to him expressing her undying love, only to find he had seen their night together as a passing diversion. Devastated, and unable to forget Roddy, she agrees to marry Martin, but realises in time that she cannot go through with it, and breaks the engagement. Julian, who has always been in love with her, now proposes that she should become his mistress, but though she initially agrees, this relationship too ends when it is revealed that Martin has been drowned at sea. Judith is left alone at the end, "a person whose whole past had made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded. Soon she must begin to think: What next? But not quite yet".
All this may sound very intense and breathless, and in truth it is. But it is so astonishingly perceptive, so acute in its observation of people, and their feelings, and the way they relate to each other. And Lehmann writes so superbly: her descriptions of the natural world are wonderful. Here's just one taster to finish with:
"It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay".
