Rosamond Lehmann

Rosamond Lehmann CBE (February 3, 1901 - March 12, 1990), was a British novelist.

Early life

Rosamond Nina Lehmann was born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, as the second daughter of Rudolph Lehmann and his wife Alice Davis, a New Englander. Her father Rudolph Chambers Lehmann was a liberal MP, and editor of the Daily News. John Lehmann (1907-1989) was her brother; her sister was the famous actress Beatrix Lehmann.

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. The hostility of men towards female intellectuals in this part of her life is fictionalized in Dusty Answer (1927). In December 1923 she married Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford) (1900-1989). It was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1927 and were divorced later that year. The experience is described in Dusty Answer and A Note in Music (1930). This was a controversial book as it showed a promiscuous woman, flirting with both men and women. Its sequel, The Weather in the Street, was made into a television film of the same name in 1983.

In 1928, Lehmann married Wogan Philipps, an artist. They had two children, a son Hugo (1929-1999) and a daughter Sarah or Sally (1934-1958), but the marriage quickly fell apart during the late Thirties with her Communist husband leaving to take part in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II she contributed to "New Writing," a periodical edited by her brother. She had an affair with Goronwy Rees and then a "very public affair" for nine years (1941-1950) with the married Cecil Day-Lewis, who eventually left her for his second wife Jill Balcon, and experimented with mescaline. [5]

Later career

Her 1936 novel The Echoing Grove was made into the 2002 film Heart of Me, with Helena Bonham Carter as the main character, Dinah. Her book The Ballad and the Source depicts an unhappy marriage from the point of view of a child, and has been compared to Henry James' What Maisie Knew. Other authors that invite comparison are E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

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. She also translated Jean Cocteau's "Les Enfants Terribles" into English.

Lehmann was awarded the CBE in 1982 and died at Clareville Grove, London on 12 March, 1990, aged 89.

Bibliography

• Dusty Answer (1927)
• Poussiere (1929)
• A Note in Music (1930)
• Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
• The Weather in the Streets (1936)
• The Ballad and the Source (1944)
• The Gipsy's Baby (1946)
• The Echoing Grove (1953)
• The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967) (non-fiction)
• A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)
• Moments of Truth (1986) (anthology, non-fiction)

• Orion (as editor) (1945)

Biographies

• "Rosamond Lehmann: A Life" by Selina Hastings (2002)
• "Rosamond Lehmann" by Diana E Lestourheon (1965)
• "L'Oeuvre de Rosamond Lehmann: Sa contribution au roman féminin (1927-1952)" by Marie-Jose Codaccioni (1983)
• "Rosamond Lehmann" by Judy Simmons (1992)
• "Rosamond Lehmann" by Gillian Tindall (1985)
• "Subjective Vision and Human Relationships in the Novels of Rosamond Lehmann" by Wiktoria Dorosz (1975)
• "Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: the Vagaries of Literary Reception" by Wendy Pollard (2004)
• "Rosamond Lehmann: a Thirties Writer" by Ruth Siegel (1990)

Letters

"My Dear Alexias: Letters from Wellesley Tudor Pole to Rosamond Lehmann" by Rosamond Lehmann (1979)

External References

• Rosamond Lehmann biography, with details of family origins and childhood. Retrieved 21 September 2007.
• Rosamond Lehmann papers. Retrieved 21 September 2007.
• Official website; biography. Another description of her biography by Selina Hastings is available.
• Rosamond Lehmann's photograph and a description of her memoirs is available here. Retrieved 21 September 2007.
• Rau, Petra. "Rosamond Lehmann". The Literary Encyclopedia. Ed. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd.
• the Literary Encyclopedia (2)
• Virago Classics
• Guardian review
• Collected papers
• The Literary Encyclopedia
• This is London
• Rosamond Lehmann biography with incorrect year of birth

Notes

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