51. Rosamond Lehmann — Dusty Answer with Lucy Scholes

AMY HELMES: Hello everyone! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW: And I’m Kim Askew, and actually, dusty is the operative word today, because we’re going to be discussing Rosamond Lehmann’s debut novel Dusty Answer — it’s a book that caused quite a scandal in its day and had lovelorn ladies of the world feeling seen.

AMY: Dusty Answer was ridiculously popular, you guys, when it was published in 1927, but it also had its fair share of vocal detractors. The book was seen as having a corrupting influence on young people, and Lehmann, herself, said that it was discussed and reviewed as if it was the “outpourings of a sex maniac.”

KIM: Haha. Honestly, that’s like the best sales pitch ever. I mean, come on. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: But there’s really so much more to this book than just the “naughty bits” (which, frankly, by today’s standards are, as you can imagine, pretty tame.) At the time, a reviewer for The New York Herald Tribune said Dusty Answer gave him “more pleasure than the work of any living English novelist save Virginia Woolf, George Moore and E.M. Forster.” 

AMY: And the distinguished poet and critic Alfred Noyes, in a review of the book for The Sunday Times, wrote: “It is the kind of novel that might have been written by Keats if Keats had been a young novelist of today.” 

KIM: Wow, that’s high praise, and I think, actually, in a lot of ways, accurate. And speaking of high praise, we’ve got a guest today whom Amy and I greatly admire, and we cannot wait to introduce her — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: Okay, so if Amy and I are the incoming freshmen in the pursuit of forgotten women writers, our guest today, Lucy Scholes, is the totally cool senior that we hope will talk to us in the hallway. 

AMY: Yeah, that’s a perfect metaphor right now because we’re recording this, basically, right around “back to school” time. So we definitely had a “we’re not worthy!” moment when she agreed to join us for an episode. Lucy is a London-based critic who writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, among others. But (this is the coolest part) she also exhumes out-of-print and forgotten books for her monthly “Re-Covered” column in The Paris Review.  

KIM: Yes, we are huge fans of her column. And in addition to all that, she hosts “Ourshelves” — it’s the official podcast of our favorite Virago Books. Every two weeks you can find Lucy interviewing big names in the literary world, talking to them about their own favorite books, music, TV shows and more. We highly recommend you go check out that podcast. But today, Lucy gets to be on the other side of the interview table, and we are excited to talk with her about Rosamond Lehmann. Lucy, welcome to the show!

LUCY SCHOLES: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm having my own “I am not worthy” moment after such a generous introduction. So thank you. It's great to be here.

KIM: You suggested we tackle Dusty Answer today, which was perfect, Lucy, because Amy and I hadn’t ever read it. When and how did you first discover it, and what was your response to it?

LUCY: Well, I think Dusty Answer was the first of Rosamond Lehmann's novels that I read, which is apt considering it was her debut. And I came across it first as an undergraduate quite a long time ago now (I won't say exactly how many years), but I remember being assigned it for a particular class that I was taking. And it was honestly like no other novel I'd read in an academic context at that stage. I mean, I’d read novels which I enjoyed and admired, and, you know, spent hours analyzing, but I had what I can only describe as quite a visceral response to Dusty Answer, in that I just sort of fell in love with it the same way that maybe I'd fallen in love with certain books as a teenager or as a young adult, you know, reading them as a child. And I just can't really describe it any other way. I fell in love with this book, but at the same time, I think I was quite fascinated by the way that Lehmann plays with ideas of fantasy and desire in the text. So there was something else there going on beneath the surface. And I know that it's one of her books that is beloved by many of her readers, but also, there are some Lehmann fans who do you think of it as being her sort of “juvenile” work, you know, because it was the first novel; that it's overly romantic. And actually, I think there's something that's quite clever there beneath the surface that not everyone sees.

KIM: I love it, and I can't wait to get into it more with you. So Rosamond Lehmann was born at home in the village of Bourne End in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1901. And she was born in the midst of a thunderstorm, no less! Her mother, Alice, was an American who hailed from New England. She met and fell for Rosamond’s father, an Englishman named Rudolph, when he was visiting the States. Rudy, as he was known, was a world-class authority on rowing (that was his number-one passion in life), but he also worked as a newspaper editor and he wrote these whimsical poems like “An Ode to the Brussels Sprout” for Punch magazine. He also was a member of parliament for four years.

AMY: “An Ode to the Brussels Sprout”... he sounds like a fun guy. And based on some anecdotes I read, it sounds like he was a fun dad, like, really creative, kind of whimsical, but I think he could also be temperamental — so kind of ran hot and cold with his own family. That said, he was really instrumental in encouraging (and critiquing) Rosamond’s writing when she was a child. 

KIM: Yeah, and, actually, he had portraits of Wilkie Collins and Robert Browning in his library that were painted by his great-uncle. His own parents hobnobbed with a number of literary greats, including Charles Dickens. And as a little girl, Rosamond (or Rosie, as she was then called) was introduced to Georgina Hogarth — that was Dickens’s sister-in-law.

AMY: So we’re going to be explaining a bit more about Lehmann’s life as we go along in this episode, but I think her novel is a helpful tool in getting to know her, so let’s just pivot to that. Lucy — (of course we give this hard part to our guests) — would you mind giving our listeners a quick, spoiler-free rundown of what Dusty Answer is about?

LUCY: Yes. Well, it's a bildungsroman. It's a story of youthful disillusionment and doomed first love. Our heroine is Judith Earle. She's an only child who’s raised in relative luxury, but isolation, in a large house on the river in the English countryside, and her otherwise solitary childhood is punctuated by visits from the Fyfe cousins — four boys and a girl — or as Lehmann puts it, “mysterious and thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations to tea and hide-and-seek.” So the Fyfes’ grandmother lives at the house next door to Judith’s, and they're there most every holiday, come to stay with her. And Judith’s just completely enchanted by these other children (some might even describe her as obsessed with them) and they occupy both her fantasies and, as she grows up, increasingly her reality, too, as she becomes entangled with each of them in turn. And the book is broken down into five parts. The first deals with memories of her childhood. In the second part, she is now eighteen, and the cousins have returned to the house next door after a few years during which they didn't visit. So she's very excited about the return. The third part then concerns Judith’s three years as a student at Cambridge. And the fourth part then covers her relationships with the Fyfes now they're all grown young adults, I suppose, at this point. And then the fifth part of the novel provides us with a summing-up as Judith now embarks on life as an adult — older, and perhaps we might say a little wiser, too.

KIM: That was great! And Dusty Answer is actually autobiographical, to an extent. Lucy, can you shed light on that a little bit, especially as it relates to Part 1 of the book? Where do things line up when comparing Lehmann’s earlier life and that of her heroine, Judith?

LUCY: Well, I think Judith’s childhood clearly draws on Lehmann’s own. So the big house by the river is very much like Fieldhead, the house in Buckinghamshire where Lehmann enjoyed her childhood. And there were lots of outdoor activities; swimming and rowing on the river. And her biographer, Selina Hastings, describes this house as “a paradise for children.” And this is something that Lehmann later looked back on with nostalgia, as a sort of “lost Eden.” I think this explains the potency of this first section of the novel. And indeed, after reading the novel, one of Lehmann’s sisters, Helen, wrote to Rosamond declaring “all the dear dead things of our childhood carried in that first part had touched me beyond words.” So there's clearly a lot of truth there in terms of what their childhood was like. There was also a particular family who lived close by (the Desboroughs) in a large house called Taplow Court. And these looked to have loosely inspired the fictional Fyfes slightly. But most importantly, one of the big differences is that Lehman was not an only child like Judith, but she did idolize her father in a way that's quite reminiscent of Judith’s own relationship with her father in the book, who's also a writer. So I think it's probably worth mentioning that the parental figures in Dusty Answer (both Judith’s and those of the cousins next door), they are sort of wispy, barely-there figures. They drift in and out of the story, but they don't figure in a particularly important way. And in this, Dusty Answer always makes me think about sort of wonderful childhood books, books for children in which parents are often kind of relegated to the sidelines of the story. You know, they don't play a big role in the kids’ imagination, therefore, they don't play a big role in the novel itself. And there's certainly a feeling of that here.

AMY: Right, that fairytale element or the Disney movie where you never see the parents.

LUCY: Yeah. 

AMY: And that ties into the sort of tone of the book, also, because, you know, the words that kept springing to mind for me as I read it were “pastoral,” “enchanted,” “halcyon,” you know? There’s just sort of this vibe that it’s a magical place. It’s a magical otherworld — especially this childhood section. 

LUCY: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. It has that feel, and I I think, for me, I love, in particular, how the beauty of the cousins and the way that Judith describes them somehow becomes just a sort of another element of the beauty of this idyllic, rural landscape. I have a little section to read here, if I may. This is from the first part. “It was the autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was 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. 

   When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them. They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.”

KIM: That’s gorgeous.

LUCY: So beautiful, and it also makes me think of, you know, that very famous line of Keats's in “To Autumn,” you know? “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” And obviously, that seems particularly apt, I think, because you mentioned the Sunday Times review of the novel that you know, you quoted the beginning of the show, talking about how it could have been written by Keats.

AMY: Exactly.

KIM: Dreams factor into the book quite often, too. Judith will sort of drift off into these imaginary reveries, which I really loved, and I know Amy did, too. What did you make of that?

LUCY: I think for me, Judith’s imagination is absolutely central to the story. So our first sort of conception of the five cousins has very little to do with their real life identities; we see them as Judith sees them, these people who have taken on this sort of larger-than-life role in her imagination. And if I can quote briefly from the novels, I think that sums it up better. She says, “In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly, explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they'd become well-nigh fantastic creatures.” And she's created this whole world in which she adores them all, you know? She wants them to adore her and she's sort of fallen in love with Charlie, the oldest boy, this beautiful golden-haired child, who she dreams of lying in bed with at night and mopping his fevered brow when he's sick. And she has such a wild imagination; it really carries her through. And I think this is something that's, you know, I guess a lot of lonely single children do this, you know, if you're an only child with not many people around, and she doesn't really have any other friends, you know? And so she's had to rely on her imagination, and she's become a sort of hopeless romantic. It's all entangled.

AMY: And at the same time, she’s awkward and shy around them; she finds them to be completely spellbinding. She thinks they exist on this higher plane of perfection, basically, and it kind of reminded me a little bit of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, you know, the cool kids that are in the book, these beautiful, perfect young people. But despite Judith’s being an awkward fan-girl around this clique of cousins, Lehmann writes: “One day they would all like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her everything. Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious, would revolve intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.” So you’re like, “Ooh, how’s this going to work?” Like, “What is this change that’s going to happen?” She has really unique bonds with each of the cousins — the cousins are all very distinct in their own ways, and so as you said, she kind of loves them collectively in a sort of way, she’s obsessed with them as a group. But you’re also, as a reader, starting to wonder which of these Fyfe cousins she has a … Fyfe or Flyte? I’m getting them confused with Sebastian Flyte!

KIM: Oh, yeah.

LUCY: Actually, they have a very similar feel — a “Bridesheady” sort of feel to it.

AMY: Yeah. But anyway, you're wondering which of these Fyfe cousins is she going to ultimately become romantically entangled with. Because you can see how it's going to play out and it could go any number of ways.

KIM: Absolutely, for sure. And soon enough, though, these idyllic childhood summers are over and the cousins stop coming. Then at the very beginning of Part 2, there’s this passage I absolutely loved. Judith finds out the Fyfes are returning; they could show up at any time, and she goes down to the river for a skinny dip. It’s night time, and like all of the descriptions of nature, I thought this was just brimming with beauty and joy and sensuality: “...she dared not venture beyond the garden for fear of encountering them unexpectedly. Only the dark was safe; and night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen window into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long-tree shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank moon-blanched level of the grass. All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the border shone up with a glimmer as of phosphorus, and the budding tree-tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash of light. 

   She went dancingly down the garden, feeling moon-changed, powerful and elated; and paused at the river's edge. The water shone mildly as it flowed. She scanned it up and down; it was deserted utterly, it was hers alone. She took off her few clothes and stepped in, dipping rapidly; and the water slipped over her breasts, round her shoulders, covering all her body. The chill water wounded her; her breath came shudderingly, in great gasps; but after a moment, she started to swim vigorously downstream. It was exquisite joy to be naked in the water’s sharp clasp. In comparison, the happiness of swimming in a bathing suit was vulgar and contemptible. To swim by moonlight alone was a sacred and passionate mystery. The water was in love with her body. She gave herself to it with reluctance, and it embraced her bitterly. She endured it, soon she desired it; she was in love with it. Gradually its harshness was appeased, and it held her and caressed her gently in her motion.” Intense, right?

AMY: I was going to say, I’m glad you chose that little passage, because I think it perfectly kind of summarizes what this book is about, in some ways. You know, we talked about how brilliant she is at writing this sort of evocative, you know, descriptions of nature. And you see how her writing is so sensual here, and it seems perfect because the book is basically about a young woman's sexual awakening, in a lot of ways, right? 

LUCY: It is; it's very sensual. It's very, it's actually quite erotic and in a not particularly explicit way, but there's a real eroticism to quite a lot of the moments. And interestingly, probably a lot of the ones that … a lot of the moments where Judith is alone; it’s not necessarily eroticism with other partners. It's about her discovering her own sort of sense of sensuality, her own beauty, her own eroticism. And I love that; I find that incredibly moving.

KIM: It made me want to go skinny dipping.

LUCY: Exactly!

KIM: In England!

AMY: That would be one of your reveries, Kim, because I can’t imagine you actually doing it. But maybe. I don’t know.

KIM: Dare me! I’m going to the lake in a couple of weeks.

AMY: Prove it on Instagram. So anyway, as Part 2 continues, Judith … she’s still seeing the newly-returned Fyfe cousins periodically. And although, as a child, she’d been in love with the cousin named Charlie, he has tragically died in the First War. So now, Judith realizes she has fallen hopelessly in love with Roddy, one of the other boys. I think Lehmann is really gifted at writing flirtatious scenes, and so I was into this romance. What did you think of Roddy and Judith’s interaction, Lucy?

LUCY: Yeah, she's completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with him. But I think what I like is, it’s so hard to work out what he feels for her. He blows hot and cold, you know; one minute, he's quite attentive to her. The next he seems completely disinterested. And I'm always impressed by the way that Lehmann writes this confusion so believably; it's done so well, in a sense, because we have nothing but Judith’s own impressions to go on. We're never inside Roddy’s head, so we never really kind of get a sense of what's going on with him. And Judith’s own interpretation of the interactions are sort of, you know, unreliable, to say the least. But I think it's worth pointing out that although she has got a very active imagination, she's not a fool. She knows the difference between dreams and reality. In fact, if anything, she's so acutely aware that she's got this kind of very wild fantasy life, she can't begin to comprehend that some of the Fyfe cousins, you know, might have their own fantasies about her. But that's also getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here, so...

KIM: Yeah, it's interesting. I think that if I had read this when I was younger, I probably would have bought into the “Roddy” romance maybe a little bit more. Reading it from my perspective, I think I was a little more like, “Red flag! Red flag!” 

AMY: She feels they're destined to be together, so when you feel that it's written in the stars, she will take any little sign. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: … as a signal that this is on, right? 

KIM: Absolutely. So in Part 3 Judith goes off to Girton College (that’s an all-girls school at Cambridge University) and there, she meets another character who takes on an almost-mythical status in Judith’s heart: a young woman named Jennifer. We understand right off the bat that this person is going to be somebody very special in Judith’s life. Lucy, would you care to read from the first scene in which Jennifer appears?

LUCY: Yes, so this is Judith...this is from Judith’s point of view. She sat at the wrong table in the dining hall on her first night at college. And so she is looking across the dining hall to the table where the other freshers are, where she should be sat: “That was where she should be humbly sitting, among those quieter heads, right at the end. There was a light there, flashing about: the tail of her eye had already caught it several times. She looked more closely. It was somebody fair head, so fiercely alive that it seemed delicately to light the air around it: a vivacious emphatic head, turning and nodding, below it a white neck and shoulder, generously modelled, leaned across the table. Then the face came round suddenly, all curves, the wide mouth laughing, warm-colored … It made you think of warm fruit, — peaches and nectarines mellowed in the sun. It seemed to look at Judith was sudden eager attention and then to smile. The eyes were meeting her own, inquiring deeply.

   “Who’s that?” said Judith excitedly, forgetful of her position. 

   “Oh, one of the freshers. I don't know her name.”

    Her name, her very name would be sure to have the sun on it. 

AMY: It's like, “MARIIIIIAAAAAAA…..” from West Side Story. That’s what I’m thinking of. Really quickly, I want to refer our listeners back to the episode we did on Amy Levy with Ann Kennedy Smith, because we talked a lot in that episode about Newnham college, which is also at Cambridge. So Girton was the other all-female college and I think Lehmann's description of what life was like there in the 1930s was really interesting. I just loved getting into that whole “boarding school” element and seeing the girls all together and they're drinking hot cocoa, you know, in the evenings and things like that. But getting back to Jennifer, we know that this book was considered scandalous in its day. You hear teases about the book, like, “Oh, it's got lesbians in it!” And really, the prospect didn't quite shock me because it seems like male homosexual encounters at universities were kind of prevalent in this era. (I'm thinking back to Brideshead Revisited, for example.) So I was just like, “Oh, okay, here we go,” you know, “they're going to fall in love or whatever.” Lehmann leaves it slightly nebulous in the book. But I will say that the two women are quite, quite close, and it's at least an intense infatuation. Lucy, what do you think we should make of this relationship between Judith and Jennifer in the book?

LUCY: Well, there are definite moments that do seem to imply that they're more than just good friends, as it were. There's a particularly famous moment in the book, a line that's often quoted. They're both bathing, skinny-dipping, again, together on an early summer's day in the river Cam. And Judith looks longingly and lovingly at Jennifer's kind of beautiful, naked body as she stands on the bank. And she says, “Glorious, glorious pagan that I adore!” whispered the voice in Judith that could never speak out. So that seems a fairly clear indication of some sort of same-sex desire. I mean, this line alone has spawned myriad academic papers on the hidden lesbianism in Dusty Answer, many of which I remember reading back in the day. And there is a convincing argument to be made for it. But I don't know, for me, I think Jennifer's gender has never really been here or there. I mean, she's absolutely another love object in this novel. But Judith is just bouncing from love object to love object as she goes through, you know? She's falling in love left, right and center. Whether she's actually sexually attracted to Jennifer seems of little consequence. And I don't know, I think we also need to think about the context of the area you're talking about. I think these sort of pashes and crushes were very typical of the era. A lot of, you know, young women, whether they're at school or at university, had them. But I don't know, I think a more fruitful way of thinking about it might be just that there's romance in the air throughout this entire book. So I'm not saying there isn't a sexual element to the relationship. But ultimately, they don't have an explicit sexual encounter. And I think we maybe need to trust Lehmann herself on this point, because she was quite shocked when readers wrote to her and complained about the lesbian romance in the book, you know. She had no idea that it was going to be read like this. (Well, that's what she claimed.) This is a very long-winded way of saying I'm not going to come down on one side or the other. I think we also need to think about the fact that Judith hasn't really had many attachments at all. She hasn't had many friendships, let alone sexual encounters. Everything about this is new to her, like falling in love with people is ... it seems to be what she's doing now, right? 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, before knowing about Lehmann’s life, it felt to me definitely like the girls were having a love affair that was passionate, even if it was mostly platonic — I mean those hairbrushing scenes were pretty intense. But as you said, Lehmann later insisted the characters in the book were all completely invented, you know, but she did attend Girton College. Considering it was an all-female college, it seems surprising that she would be so out of touch with lesbianisn that her husband apparently had to explain it to her. I don’t know if that’s true. But anyway, Lucy, what, if anything, about her time at Girton might parallel Lehmann’s real-life experiences?

LUCY: Well, she certainly experienced a very close intoxicating friendship with a fellow student, Grizel Buchanan. I think Lehmann described their relationship as a “very emotional friendship” and Grizel herself as a “temptation to everyone, like a particularly heady wine,” which, you know, reading between the lines again, right? But this was also the period in Lehmann's life in which she experienced her first heterosexual heartbreak. So she had a short-lived romance with a young man called David Keswick. And at the very end of her time at Cambridge, they went to a ball together one evening and danced together all night, and they'd been flirting for quite a long time before this. And he kissed her rather passionately. And because she was such an innocent, she sort of took this as a proposal of marriage and said to him, you know, “Write to me! Write to me!” He disappears off into the night, and then she finds out that he's actually engaged to somebody else. And she's heartbroken by this, you know, and this experience obviously feeds directly into what happens between Judith and Roddy in the novel.

KIM: Yeah, was it really just a kiss? 

AMY: Yes, that’s true.

KIM: So, Rosamond Lehmann was considered a great beauty of her day. Apparently T.S. Eliot said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. (So this is something she recalled him saying, so who knows if that’s true, but she does look Hollywood gorgeous in the photos we saw of her online, and she did have a lot of men throwing themselves at her.

AMY: If anybody out there is contemplating, especially in this Covid era, just forgoing hair dye and letting your hair go its natural shade … she began to have her hair turned silver when she was very, very young, like in her early twenties. And by her mid forties, her hair was completely white. That was one of her, you know, signature features of her beauty basically, was this shock of white hair. So if you need any inspiration for embracing your gray, Rosamond Lehmann is your girl! So back to the Girton years, while she was at college Lehmann felt hopeless about finding her soulmate in the aftermath of WWI. And she even says, “as all the young men have been killed, I shall never marry.” She remembered thinking that.

KIM: Right and then it turns out a shortage of men was never really her problem. Instead, it was maybe the opposite.

AMY: Like her novel’s heroine, Lehmann was an incurable romantic, often to her own detriment. And we’ll get to all that shortly, but first, let’s get back to the novel. We have Judith connected at the hip to Jennifer, but I think we should also point out this other student at Girton, a character named Mabel. She’s kind of annoying, she’s a not-very attractive, hanger-on whom Judith finds to be a complete bore. She does not want to be saddled with this girl. So she's torn between trying to be polite, but also being like, “I don't want you hanging out with me!” I think there actually was a “version” of this young woman in Lehmann’s experience at Girton. But what I like about her inclusion in the novel is that it helps us see Judith’s petty side shine through, you know? She can be a mean girl. What do you think, Lucy?

LUCY: I think Judith is in no way perfect. In fact, by the end of the novel, I think most of the characters that she has been close to at one time or other have had to learn this about her in quite a hard way. You know, she gets her heart broken, but she breaks hearts too. And she's also very careless with other peoples’ feelings in the way that I think you know, probably a lot of us can be when we're young and don't think things through. 

KIM: For sure. After a heady two-year romance (or very intense friendship, however you choose to see it) with Jennifer, their relationship falls apart. Judith is badly shaken up by this, but still, in the back of her head, she has Roddy on the brain. 

AMY: And this takes us to Part 4 of the book, when they eventually meet up again, and it is on — or at least it seems to be on from Judith's point of view, to the extent that she allows Roddy to make love to her one night under a tree by the river’s edge. And the next morning, she writes him this blissful letter talking about how they’re going to be together now forever, and his response is basically: “I’m afraid you misunderstood me.”

KIM: It's gut-wrenching, even though you can see it coming. It's absolutely gut-wrenching. Yeah.

AMY: This in-person confrontation that they eventually have later that day is particularly agonizing. Lucy, how about you read us a small part of that exchange to kind of help drive home the misery?

LUCY: Yeah, the whole episode is unbearably awkward. He behaves like quite a thoughtless cad. But I think it's her wide-eyed innocence that’s sort of so heartbreaking. I said earlier that she's not foolish, and she really isn't; but she is naive. And I think what's so kind of torturous about this. We watch in real time as it sort of dawns on her just how unworldly she is. So Roddy says, “I'm afraid You've misunderstood me.” 

   “Yes, I've misunderstood you. You see, this sort of thing has never happened to me before and I thought ... when a person said … Why did you say ... I didn't know people said that without meaning it ... I suppose we must mean different things by it. That's what it is. Well…” Her voice was terrible: a little panting wine. 

   “I don't know what you mean.”

   Probably that was true: he had forgotten he had ever said: ‘I love you.’ She could not remind him; for In any case he would not be affected. What were three little words? … And after all, she had probably more or less forced him to say them: she had wanted to hear them so much, she had driven him to say them. Yes, he had groaned, and quickly repeated them to keep her quiet, stop her mouth so that he could go on kissing her. She said:

   “But, why, Roddy, why did you take me out ... behave as you did ... kiss me so — so ... I don't understand why you bothered … why you seemed…”

   He was silent. Oh God! If only he would wound and wound with clean thrusts of truth, instead of standing there mute, deaf.”

AMY: So she is so filled with shame, and at the same time, she’s trying to keep her dignity. I think the roller-coaster of emotions she endures (really throughout the book) is quite relatable to any woman who has lived to a certain age. I just kept thinking how much I could have used this book when I was in my twenties and pining away over total jerks. It’s just a reminder that love makes idiots of us all.

KIM: Yeah, I could have definitely been called naive a few times. Yeah, that was absolutely painful. It’ll take me a minute to recover.

AMY: You can totally understand why the book resonated with women, right?

KIM: Absolutely.

LUCY: Yeah. And I think this is what the readers felt. I mean, Lehmann was inundated with letters from female fans telling her that “this is my story!” There were people who wrote to her to vent their revulsion, too: “Before consigning your book to the flames,” wrote one woman who signed herself the Mother of Six, “I would wish to inform you of my disgust that anyone should pen such filth, especially a Miss.” (You know, the two ends of the spectrum there.) And I think, like you two, I absolutely identified with these parts. Like you said earlier, we've all experienced heartbreak that at the time feels as traumatic as this does. And Lehman is so brilliant at pinpointing that on the page, but I think perhaps also, more so than that element of the book, the thing I find most relatable and sort of always have is Judith’s longing to be seen by the cousins in that first section, when she realizes they're returning to the house next door for the first time. And her immediate reaction is a strange mixture of excitement and absolute fear. She's distinctly afraid that they won't remember her. If I may, just quote briefly: “She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly has herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered them.” And these lines, I mean, they've stayed with me ever since I first read the book. These cousins are so important to her. And she's so utterly preoccupied by the fear that they might just not think of her with the sort of same affection and magnitude that she does. And I think, you know, this is what elevates the novel, what makes it, to me, more than just an evocative tale of first love, which it is, and beautifully done. But by the end of the book, we see that the tables have turned and that’s Judith herself, and the reader comes to finally understand that she has played a really large role in the Fyfes’ fantasy worlds, you know, as large as they've played in hers. But she just doesn't see it for such a long time.

AMY: You had mentioned that you read this book when you were an undergrad. 

LUCY: Mm-hmm.

AMY: So you were like, early twenties, basically, kind of Judith’s age. And I wonder if I would have read it somehow differently in my twenties. As I'm now reading in my forties, (I would have enjoyed it equally both ways) but I think in a very different way. And I'm wondering if reading it again now as you're a bit older has changed your perspective on it?

LUCY: Yeah, I think I must admit, I was actually quite frightened to go back to it again, because it made such a visceral impression on me the first time around. I was a bit worried that I'd go back to it for this — I hadn't read it since I first read it, I just knew I loved it — and I was worried that it would be sort of spoiled as an older woman going back to it now. But I still found it remarkably poignant, I think, and maybe that is because I still have the recollection of reading it the first time round. But I think that when I first read it, it definitely captured so many feelings. You know, the first love; this sense of these friendships, these incredibly kind of important friendships and relationships that you have with people, whether they're sexual or platonic, and the way that they become this huge part of your life. And that fear that maybe they don't think the same way about you and I can't quite get over how well Lehmann does that in this novel.

KIM: Yeah, and the self awareness to have, even when she's talking to Roddy, she wants him to say that he loves her. But she doesn't want him to say it if it isn't true, and she gets what's going on. And I thought that was so powerful to give that that complexity and that added layer that just makes it that much more intense.

AMY: It's like an elegy to youth. It's taking you back to this dreamy place when you were younger. And I think no matter what age you are, when you're reading it, it transports you back to that time period.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. So we don’t want to give away too much of the rest of the book, but after being used and tossed away by Roddy, Judith becomes a shell of the person she once was, and her involvement with the rest of the cousins becomes complicated as a result. 

AMY: Yeah, and then Lehmann’s real love life, as we said, was as up-and-down as Judith’s — even more so, in fact. So in the midst of her disastrous first marriage to a guy who was a total jerk, she fell madly in love with the man who would become her second husband (and with whom she’d have two children). But the bloom fell off that rose, and then she wound up taking up with the very married Cecil Day-Lewis (who is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis). And he was probably the great love of her life. But she was his mistress. And for almost a decade they were together until he ditched her for a younger woman. And that was just devastating to her. She never quite recovered. (And oddly enough, she even tried to form an alliance with Cecil’s first wife, the woman she first stole him from. She kind of like, met up with her and was like, “Hey, he's now dating this third woman. Do you and I want to sort of team up and make sure that doesn't happen?” And weirdly, the wife was sort of on board with it. But it got a little complicated.) But suffice to say it was all a little bit pathetic. She had some brief affairs with other men, including James Bond author Ian Fleming, and she even took one of her son's friends for a lover. He was 30 years younger than her at the time. So it goes on and on reading about her romantic exploits, and you sort of start to lose count of the number of lovers she had throughout her life and reading about it all. I just kept thinking, “What are you doing? Like, oh my gosh, just stop!” 

KIM: She wanted to keep falling in love. She seems like she was in love with the idea of love. What do you think, Lucy?  

LUCY: Yeah, I think absolutely. Like you say, none of her marriages or affairs lasted. Nevertheless, they were grand romances at the time, and she gave everything to each of them in turn. I also think her beauty (which you mentioned earlier) played quite a huge role in this. She clearly inspired grand passion in many men, and she responded to this passionately. She wanted to be desired. She loved being desired by the men. And in the biography, Selena Hastings explains that even when Lehmann was quite an elderly woman — long after she'd lost her figure and had become quite stout and her youthful allure had left her — she still behaved as if she was the great beauty in the room, always. And she still expected men to fall at her feet. Although you could argue there’s something rather sort of sad and tragic about this sort of refusal to accept reality, another part of me thinks kind of, “You go girl!” You know?

KIM: Yeah, absolutely!

LUCY: I think it's kind of admirable. It suggests an impressive degree of self worth, you know, that you could still act like you are this incredible beauty when you're actually quite an old, stout woman.

KIM: Isn't that what we're all supposed to be trying to do? Yeah, yeah. So we know that Lehmann hung out with the Bloomsbury set in the 1930s, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf… She was acquainted with so many illustrious writers of her day, (including Elizabeth Bowen, Dylan Thomas, T.S, Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, Graham Greene...and countless more). 

AMY: Catch your breath. Catch your breath.

KIM: Yeah, no seriously. It’s surprising, then, that she sort of fell off the radar for many people. As I mentioned at the beginning, Amy and I had never read her. Any ideas about why she’s maybe not as remembered or as read as she should be? Or is that just something here in the States?

LUCY: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, I think, you know, obviously, there's plenty of books or bestsellers that were once huge, that kind of fall off the radar as times change. And just because she was a bestseller in the ’20s doesn't mean that she was going to be read as much in the ’60s. But I also always wonder if it's something to do with her reputation as a romance novelist. There's definitely some snobbery going on there, I think. I mean, she certainly wrote about love. She wrote about romance, there's no question about that. But if she was described to me as only a romance novelist, I might very well not be interested in picking her work up, you know? (I can be a snob as much as the next person.) So I think that definitely has something to do with it. But you know, she does write about these topics, but she also writes about them in such a sort of truthful and beautiful way and also in a very innovative way. You mentioned the Bloomsbury connection, but like Woolf, she uses stream-of-consciousness technique, you know? She moves between interiority and exterior explication (sometimes in the space of a single paragraph) in such a kind of elegant and effortless way. Yet today, I think I'd be willing to bet that she's still mostly read for her subject matter, not for style, which I think is a bit of a travesty. I'm gonna acknowledge as well that she is better known here in the UK. She was the success story of the Virago Modern Classics in the 1980s. So when they were first launched as a series, they did two of her books: Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets in 1981. And both of these, they each sold 20,000 copies, which is a huge amount, and that was in the space of three years only. I mean, any author would be happy to sell 20,000 copies, let alone as a reprint later in life. And she became, then, a sort of literary celebrity all over again. So she is known, but I think she has a certain reputation. Let's put it that way.

AMY: So you mentioned her other novels (I think she wrote eight in total, as well as some short story collections and an autobiography). I know some of her other books are considered to be even better than Dusty Answer, critically. Have you read anything else by her? Or are there any other novels she's written that you would like to read to check out?

LUCY: Yeah, I must admit that when I first read Dusty Answer and I fell for her, I fell so hard I immediately went out and bought everything else she'd ever written and read it. 

AMY: I love it!

KIM: I was completely enamored. And I will say, I, I do love Dusty Answer; I think it's a beautiful book. I think my favorite of hers is The Weather in the Streets, a novel that she wrote a bit later. And that is a book that (unlike Dusty Answer), I actually have read on multiple occasions. It is one of those books that I sort of come back to when I need a comfort read. And I mean that in the broadest sense of the term; it's not a particularly comforting novel in terms of ... so it's, it's another story of a kind of doomed love. This time our heroine is Olivia Curtis. She's a woman in her late twenties. She's living sort of on the Bohemian fringes of London in the 1930s. She's separated from her husband, and she embarks on an affair with a married man named Rollo, who grew up in a house; a sort of wealthier family near hers in the countryside. So there are some sort of similar elements with Dusty Answer there. And Invitation to the Waltz is the sort of precursor to The Weather in the Streets. It tells the story of Olivia Curtis's childhood, and a ball at which she first met Rollo. And I think those two ... my favorite is The Weather in the Streets. But I think those two are often seen as a sort of pinnacle of Lehmann’s work. So if anyone was looking to read something else after this, I would say go and read those two. 

AMY: That would be me. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And I love the idea of you just becoming full-on obsessed, because I do that too. I just get in his zone and I am devouring it all. 

LUCY: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so apparently, Lehmann turned down an offer for the film rights to Dusty Answer — her second husband convinced her it was a bad idea (which I think that was a bad idea). But a movie was going to be made of another one of her novels, The Ballad and The Source, but then that didn’t come to pass, as so often happens in Hollywood. A few of her other books did get adapted. Her novel The Echoing Grove became a 2002 film called The Heart of Me starring Paul Bettany and Helena Bonham Carter. And then The Weather in the Streets, which you mentioned, was made into an ’80s TV movie starring Joanna Lumley and Michael York. So maybe those are worth checking out. I don’t know if you’ve seen those, Lucy, but listeners, give us a shout-out if anybody’s seen that and if they’re worth watching.)

KIM: I can't believe I haven't seen The Heart of Me, because Helena Bonham Carter and Paul Bettany sounds like…

AMY: I know it sounds up our alley.

KIM: Yeah.

LUCY: I've seen that. I did actually quite like it. I went to try and find it again recently to rewatch for this as research. And, unfortunately, it’s not available here in the UK at the moment, so I don't know what's happened to it. But I remember thinking it was quite well done. That's another beautiful novel. I'd recommend them all. But you know, yeah.

KIM: Great, no, no… that’s fantastic. I will watch that, too. Maybe we’ll have an online viewing for that, Amy.

AMY: If we can find it.

KIM: Yeah, if it’s available here. What do we think of a Dusty Answer film or mini series? Would you want to see it? I would. What do you think?

LUCY: I’m going to kind of burst the bubble slightly and say, I'm not sure if it would ever be quite as poignant as the book, only because I think the book is, for me ... so much of the novel lies in the sort of shifting perspectives. And in the way that I think, like I mentioned earlier, Judith is sort of an unreliable narrator. (Not that she's trying to hide things, but it's only at the very end of the novel that we're sort of able to see her in the way that others see her: as this beautiful, accomplished, desirable object.) And she sees herself as something so different to that throughout. And I think that revelation is so important to the story. I don't know how you would do that in the film. It will be very obvious that she is beautiful and accomplished throughout. You’d have to have a wonderful actress playing her.

KIM: A “makeover moment!” [laughs]

LUCY: That’s the thing: it is a sort of “makeover” novel, but the reveal is in the words on the page rather than the image.

AMY: More subtle.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: I think you'd also need a director and cinematographer who could capture the glory of that natural description. You know, the laying on the lawn smoking cigarettes languidly along the Thames — that dreamscape kind of thing.

LUCY: And also, that first section is so fragmentary. You know, we take that for granted in writing today, literary fiction, but again, I think it was relatively innovative at the time it was written. These fragments of recollections and memories of our childhood — to put that on the screen would be, it might be hard to do. I'm sure somebody could do it, but it wouldn't necessarily be straightforward.

AMY: Right. Speaking of “fragmented,” Lehmann got really into mysticism and the paranormal later in life after the tragic death of her daughter, Sally, who died unexpectedly in her twenties. I think it was probably a coping mechanism, but with the help of psychics, she claimed to be able to speak with Sally and other people from the beyond, including her old pal, Virginia Woolf. Her friends and family were naturally skeptical and very concerned, you know, thinking she’d had a break from reality. 

KIM: Yeah, I don’t know, the fact that she would commune with spirits almost seems fitting, when you think of the haunting mystical some of Dusty Answer is. At any rate, it did bring her a lot of solace and comfort before her ultimate death in 1990. What do you think Dusty Answer offers today’s reader, Lucy? What makes it worth reading or relevant?

LUCY: Well, I think I'm going to be annoyingly argumentative and suggest that I'm always wary of things being worth reading, because they're “relevant.” I think Dusty Answer is worth reading because it's, you know, the kind of book that consumes you like a fever dream while you read it. It's worth it for that alone. However, I think, you know, we've all mentioned that our own experiences of young love resonate in Judith’s experiences. And so it seems that it doesn't matter about the passing of time. The era might be different, you know, the context might be very different, but we've all experienced heartbreak and young love. And also ultimately, it is a novel about a very painful process of growing up. And so anyone who's experienced that at any point, I think, can also relate.

KIM: I would add to that the natural beauty, when you're stuck inside in a city … it's palpable. That feeling of nature and being outside in … I just found myself letting myself go into that world as I was reading it, and it felt very visceral.

AMY: Escapism. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, it's perfect for that.

AMY: And now I'm definitely interested in going to read some more works by Rosamond Lehmann. And as always, Lucy, I'll be following your “Re-Covered” column for other buried classics like this that we can all check out. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure.

KIM: We can't thank you enough. We were both jumping up and down thrilled when you said yes. So thank you. 

LUCY: It’s been my pleasure entirely. I've had a great time getting to chat about this. And also, I owe you a great debt of thanks, because I think, like I said, I don't think I would have gone back to this novel if I hadn't had an impetus like this to go and read it. And it has been a pure pleasure to kind of slip back into Judith’s life again. So thank you both so much. I love the podcast, so it's a real pleasure to be on it. Brilliant. 

KIM: Thank you.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. We hope you share today’s book recommendation with all friends…

KIM: Yes, and while you’re at it, point them in the direction of our podcast and Lucy’s podcast for Virago. It’s called “Ourshelves”... And speaking of podcasts, Amy, can you believe it’s been almost ONE YEAR since we launched “Lost Ladies of Lit?”

AMY: I know! That’s crazy! It’s hard to believe, but actually, time flies when you’re reading great books and having fun.

KIM: Yep, that’s true. It’s been a blast.

AMY: So anyway, next week we’re going to look back at all the bloopers and “best of” moments from the past 12 months. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And also, just thank you to everyone who has made this podcast part of their weekly routine. We’re so thrilled to have you along for the ride.

KIM: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Until next week … bye, everyone!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.