Rosamond Lehmann: A Revaluation

Abstract

The recent interest in women's fiction, studies, and points of view has revived many literary reputations from Mrs. Gaskell to Anais Nin, but has, so far, apparently neglected Rosamond Lehmann. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, however, Miss Lehmann was frequently discussed as fully the equal of Elizabeth Bowen and almost the equal of Virginia Woolf, all three drawn together under the heading of feminine, a term that did not seem so condescending then as it does now, that connoted the delicate, the perceptive, the working of insight in a smaller area often missed by the blunter, clumsier, masculine sensibility. The 1945 American publishers of The Ballad and the Source, Miss Lehmann's best-known novel, trumpeted this feminine fiction with a lemon-pistachio cover and raspberry letters. Part of the reason for the current neglect of Miss Lehmann's work is clearly her silence. After publishing four novels in the first decade of her career (1927 through 1936), she has published only two novels, five short stories, one play, and a slim volume of fragments of an inner life since 1936-and no fiction at all in the last twenty years. But I have assumed there must be other reasons as well, attitudes expressed within the fiction, perhaps not unlike those attitudes contained in Doris Lessing's recent The Summer Before the Dark that caused so many of the reviewers to complain because Lessing had not provided some blazingly affirmative new role for her forty-five-year-old heroine. Another reason, more valid critically, might be flaws in Miss Lehmann's work not so easily visible a generation ago. My curiosity about these possible reasons and about the fiction itself led me, recently, to read her novels and stories again.