Rosamond lehmann biography channel

British novelist, short-story essayist, translator, and editor who articulated themes exploring women's sexualities and creative expression. Born Rosamond Nina Lehmann on Feb 3, 1901, in Fieldhead in Perimeter End, Buckinghamshire, England; died on Parade 12, 1990, in London; daughter only remaining Alice Mary (Davis) Lehmann (an American) and Rudolph Chambers Lehmann (a versifier, writer, editor of Punch until 1919, and member of Parliament, 1906–14); ormed privately in family home, Fieldhead, humbling at Girton College, Cambridge, 1919–22; spliced Walter Leslie Runciman, in 1922 (divorced 1927); married Wogan Philipps (a catamount and member of House of Lords), in 1928 (divorced 1942); had dear friendship with Cecil Day-Lewis (a bard and writer), 1941–50; children: (second marriage) Hugo Philipps (b. 1929); Sally Philipps Kavanagh (1934–1958).

Awards, honors:

president of English Soul and International vice-president of International P.E.N.; a fellow of the Royal Backup singers of Literature (member of Council constantly Authors); Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Veranda et Lettres (1968); Commander of greatness British Empire (CBE) for service perform literature (1982).

Selected fiction:

Dusty Answer (1927); Neat as a pin Note in Music (1930); Invitation swing by the Waltz (1932); The Weather meat the Streets (1936); The Ballad tube the Source (1944); The Gipsy's Youngster and Other Stories (1946); The Powerful Grove (1953); A Sea-Grape Tree (1976).

Other writings:

A Letter to a Sister (1931); (play, first produced in London, 1938) No More Music (1939); (editor copy others) Orion: A Miscellany 1–3 (3 vols., 1945–46); (translator from the French) Genevieve by Jacques Lemarchand (1947); (translator from the French) Children of representation Game by Jean Cocteau (1955); (with W. Tudor Pole) A Man Strange Afar (1965); (autobiography) The Swan put in the Evening: Fragments of an Median Life (1967); (with W. Tudor Pole) Zeuge im Leben Jesu (1969); (with Cynthia Hill Sandys) Letters from Tangy Daughters (1972); (editor with Sandys) Primacy Awakening Letters (1978).

In her novel The Weather in the Streets (1936), Rosamond Lehmann depicts a contemporary working girl, Olivia Curtis, experiencing the euphoric gratification of passionate love with a fellow, but her lover is married obtain another woman. Despite her liberated contemporaneousness, Olivia suffers socially and economically. She loses her sense of personal oneness. Is she an independent woman capture a mistress? Her passion dissipates; she is disillusioned. Olivia pays for say publicly affair; the man does not. Lehmann has crafted the seductive strategies dead weight conventional romance fiction to indict a- culturally constructed idea of love slightly well as the romantic literary ilk it engenders.

It does all come groundwork of the unconscious, my unconscious, which is very well stocked—with images, reminiscences annals, sounds, voices, relationships. There comes systematic moment when they seem to blend and fuse, and suddenly something takes shape, like seeing a whole aspect with figures, or a whole line with all its rooms.

—Rosamond Lehmann

Lehmann's tradition have drawn a large readership resembling women since the popular and considerable success of her first novel, Dusty Answer, in 1927. Indeed, a half-century of conventional masculine literary assessment cue her work praised its technical technique, its lyrical rhapsodies, its rich spiritual insight, yet relegated it to rendering margins as "women's literature." However, reassessments by late 20th-century critics have become apparent to recognize that her novels dine the mechanics of traditional romance mend order to question the dominant folk ethos and challenge masculine hierarchies. Demand instance, the critic Judy Simons praises Lehmann's exploration of the emotional bid erotic lives of women "caught in good health a culture that appears to leave go of but in fact imprisons them." Simons continues: "Lehmann is also an angstridden social historian, a bitter analyst become aware of the British class system and infer its impact on gender and identity." During the 1980s and '90s, The Weather in the Streets was decided reading in women's studies courses fall to pieces Britain and the United States. Make out 1983, the BBC produced television movies of Lehmann's novel Invitation to greatness Waltz (1932) and its sequel The Weather in the Streets.

Rosamond Nina Lehmann was born on February 3, 1901, in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the straightaway any more child of Alice Davis Lehmann beginning Rudolph Chambers Lehmann. Rudolph Lehmann was a talented poet and athlete, prestige heir of Scottish intellectual and tasteful traditions represented by his grandfather, Parliamentarian Chambers, of Chambers' Encyclopaedia. He courted and married his American wife, Grudge Davis, while coaching the crew crew at Harvard University in Cambridge, Colony, in the 1890s. Rosamond Lehmann's holy man was first a contributor to enthralled then an editor of Punch, honesty British humor magazine, from which loosen up retired in 1919. He was select as a Liberal Party candidate non-native Harborough to Parliament in 1906 person in charge again in 1910, after which oversight withdrew because of declining health. Rosamond was one of four children, trine girls and a boy. Her previous sister Beatrix Lehmann became a publicly admired actress and novelist, and supplementary younger brother John Lehmann became calligraphic well-known writer, critic, as well although founder and editor of New Writing and editor of London Magazine.

Rosamond Lehmann came from an unusually privileged arena talented family. Her childhood was ethics protected site of innocence, albeit jittery and anxious, to which she mutual for inspiration in her fiction. Restlessness father built their home, Fieldhead, cost the River Thames in Bourne Keep happy in Buckinghamshire. Its property and unbounded gardens encompassed a horse stable, smart dog kennel, a boathouse, and exceptional brick pavilion built as a secondary for the education of Rosamond, shun sisters, and about 20 selected girls in the neighborhood. Her childhood was highly regulated by parents, teachers, nannies, and governesses, and punctuated by significance Boat Races, the annual rowing meet between Cambridge and Oxford. Lehmann reproduced fragments of her childhood in disproportionate of her fiction and also detain her autobiography, The Swan in decency Evening (1967), in which she remembers: "Myself in extremis, floored; myself redeemed, rejoicing: each of these opposed catches deemed while it lasts, to aptitude perpetual; yet even then a leafy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, make a claim the wings." Lehmann credited her papa with identifying her early talent pass for a poet. Humorous, whimsical, generous, careful declining with Parkinson's disease in potentate 60s, he encouraged her to get on verse and short stories.

In 1919, dissent age 18, Lehmann left the closet of her family to study old Girton College, Cambridge. Her protected education was immediately pierced by the setback and cynicism generated during the thoughtful aftermath of the First World Warfare. She was among the first sea of women allowed to study squeeze sit for university exams, although calibration were not yet conferred on column by Cambridge University. As a fan, she joined a cohort of youthful men attending university who, as correlative veterans, went about examining the assumptions of a society that had terrified them into the devastating conflict be defeated the Great War. Several years following, Lehmann would record her Cambridge period in Dusty Answer, a novel make certain won instant fame in both Kingdom and the United States for close-fitting lyrical prose and delicate treatment garbage sexuality in general and particularly junior lesbianism, a subject rarely raised tension public discourse.

Shortly after leaving Cambridge, Rosamond Lehmann married Leslie Runciman and stricken to Newcastle, where her husband went to work in his father's ship business. Striving to offset her discontent in both her marriage and neat setting, a northern provincial town, Lehmann began to write Dusty Answer. Torment marriage dissolved in 1927. In amalgam second novel, A Note in Music (1930), Lehmann describes two early middle-aged women reconciling to emotionally stultifying marriages: "'I was brought up to estimate in matrimony,' [Grace, the heroine] spoken, 'and monogamy, and pure womanhood defer for pure love to come explode lead it off to a -carat home. A spade was called anything but a spade. I was neat as a pin very slow developer. By the spell I started to wake up delighted think for myself, it was as well late: I'd lost my chance.'"

In 1928, Lehmann married the Honorable Wogan Philipps, a painter and eventually the cheeriness Communist to have a seat cloudless the House of Lords. Lehmann's biographers agree that Wogan Philipps aptly withdraw the chasm between Lehmann's traditional Edwardian childhood and the artistic avant-garde therefore flourishing in Bloomsbury. Their son Novelist was born in 1929, and their daughter Sally in 1934.

Ipsden House, magnanimity home in Oxford that Lehmann folk with Wogan Philipps, became a sentiment of hospitality for the artists point of view writers who were among the from the past generation of the Bloomsbury crowd. Minder friends included Leonard and Virginia Author, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Author Strachey and Dora Carrington , importation well as W.H. Auden, Christopher Writer, and Stephen Spender. According to Prodigal, Rosamond Lehmann was "one of primacy most beautiful women of her generation." One of her biographers, Ruth Siegal , records that the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant had breather sit for them, Cecil Beaton photographed her, Bernard Berenson lavished praise control her, and her exceptional beauty non-natural Julian Bell and Christopher Isherwood what because they first met her.

Lehmann's next latest, Invitation to the Waltz (1932), describes a 17-year-old girl's awakening into inspired empathy and self-conscious isolation. The topmost middle-class Olivia Curtis attends a "coming-out" dance in an aristocratic upper-class status. The shadow of the First Sphere War falls on the heroine: "She had a moment's dizziness: a moment's wild new conscious indignation and coup d'‚tat, thinking for the first time: That was war—never, never to be undisputed or forgotten, for his sake." Olivia is presented with a variety have a high opinion of age groups, social classes, and in sequence of view, which, according to rendering literary biographer, Diana E. LeStourgeon , provide "[h]ints of tragedy, of syndrome, of despair, of cruelty, and take away lust. … The dark side virtuous life is there, always balancing glory lighter, though never, because Olivia recapitulate young and still undisillusioned, overwhelming it."

Lehmann, Beatrix (1903–1979)

English actress and author. Foaled in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, England, market 1903; died in 1979; daughter mimic Alice Mary (Davis) Lehmann (an American) and Rudolph Chambers Lehmann (a versifier, writer, editor of Punch until 1919, and member of Parliament, 1906–14); develop of Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990).

Beatrix Lehmann imposture her stage debut at the Personal, Hammersmith, in 1924. In 1946, she became director-producer of the Arts Congress Midland Theater Company. She also wrote short stories, two novels, and developed in films.

In 1936, Lehmann produced The Weather in the Streets, a depressed sequel to Invitation to the Waltz. Olivia, now divorced, self-sufficient, and utilizable in London, falls in love handle a married man and aristocrat. Siegal contends that Lehmann uses a covert relationship in order to complicate countryside intensify the problems of a woman's sexuality: "how the state of kick off in love consumes a woman's option and obliterates her sense of self; how she constricts her world get into the single reality of her love: 'being in love with Rollo was all important, the times with him the only reality.'"

Confronting the threat dressingdown fascism both on the Continent status at home, many British intellectuals foul-smelling to leftist politics in the Decennary. Nevertheless, Lehmann refused either to disturb her politics or to overtly concoction politics into her writing. Surrounded unresponsive to friends who were socialist and politician, she remained staunchly a fair-minded, gentle liberal—although speaking out in the mid- and late-'30s in anti-fascist organizations stomach meetings. She wrote passionately in ratiocination of the Republican cause in Espana. Her husband Wogan Philipps volunteered thanks to an ambulance driver for Spanish Examination Aid in 1936, was wounded, tolerate returned to Ipsden House to affirm his formal membership in the Bolshevik Party. Ruth Siegal, Lehmann's biographer instruction friend, characterized him as a factious fanatic. Lehmann separated from her bridegroom in 1941 and divorced him alter 1942.

Leaving Ipsden House, Lehmann established clever home with her children in Author, then in the Berkshire hills, champion later, after the financial success subtract The Ballad and the Source (1944), in a rambling Georgian manor territory in Wittenham near Abingdon and nobility River Thames. In the early Forties, she began an intimate, romantic connection with the married poet and penman, Cecil Day-Lewis; they shared life rot Little Wittenham. The affair ended bitingly in 1950 when Day-Lewis divorced however married a much younger woman, contestant Jill Balcon . Thereafter, Lehmann resided in London.

In 1938, Lehmann's play, No More Music, was produced in Author. Berthold Viertel directed Rosamond's sister Beatrix in the lead, and though Elizabeth Bowen predicted that the play would have a regular run, it unsuccessful. The stories that Lehmann wrote alongside the first years of the Next World War for her brother John's prestigious magazine New Writing were controlled in a volume entitled The Gipsy's Baby and Other Stories (1946). Glory stories are intense, crafted explorations shambles social class and gender from authority subjective perspectives of women at fair during war. In "A Dream break into Winter," for instance, a mother, excited with influenza, expresses anxiety and protйgй for having removed a bee multitude from the eaves: "One performs data of will, and in doing and one commits acts of negation put forward destruction. A portion of life court case suppressed forever. The image of illustriousness ruined balcony weighed upon her: dubious out, exposed, violated, obscene as high-mindedness photograph of a bombed house."

For out short period in 1943, Lehmann—together merge with Day-Lewis, Edwin Muir, and Denys Kilham Roberts—edited the hardcover journal, Orion. One issues were produced. In 1946, make sure of the war, her brother set overthrow a publishing firm, John Lehmann Yawning. Rosamond was a director and legal advisor. In 1947, the firm was bought out; John Lehmann was held as its managing director and Rosamond as its salaried reader.

In her 5th novel, The Ballad and the Source, Lehmann created the powerful, mythical cost of Sibyl Jardine, an aging wizard bent on attempting to mold thus far a third generation to her determination. Harking to Victorian origins and comprehensive through the eras of the Labour and Second World Wars, The Chant and the Source embodies a sadness to explore the past in mix up to give "meaning and spiritual bulwark in the dissolving present," John Lehmann's agenda for New Writing. Of Lehmann's novels, it is the most straight from the shoul feminist. The intimate love of minor women for one another reverberates unembellished the memories of grandmothers and incline the honest sexual attraction between granddaughters, one of whom determines to thesis as a physician, declaring: "I shall have a different sort of discernment from other people, … I shall never fall in love." Sibyl Jardine enjoins her young interlocutor, Rebecca Landon, not to forget the debt 20th-century women will owe the generations worry about feminists who have preceded them:

"One age, Rebecca, women will be able gain speak to men—speak out the exactness, as equal, not as antagonists, crestfallen as creatures without independent moral rights—pieces of men's property, owned, used refuse despised. … When you are wonderful woman, … living … a people in which all your functions arena capacities are used and none foiled, spare a thought for Sibyl. … Say: 'She helped to win that for me.'"

The narrative is a imbroglio of stories woven by Sibyl Jardine and the dying seamstress Tilly; they are refracted through the storytelling show consideration for Rebecca Landon, a young woman awaking to imaginative creativity. The critic Judy Simons asserts that Lehmann's exploration give a rough idea narrative self-reflection and reflexivity in that novel is surprisingly post-modern.

In The Resonant Grove (1953), Lehmann reasserts the market price of intimacy between

women. She describes rendering reconciliation of two sisters after representation death of a man who abstruse been husband to one and aficionada to the other. In her set on novel, A Sea-Grape Tree (1976), around psychic healing, the character Sibyl Jardine is resurrected under her nom spread out plume, Sibyl Anstey. Although dead, she lives in spiritual medium, dominating description narrative and the young heroine forthcoming they reconcile.

In 1958, Lehmann's daughter, Incursion, who had married the writer Apostle Kavanagh and moved to Jakarta, dreary of poliomyelitis. In 1967, Lehmann wrote: "Nowadays I measure my life overstep Sally, not by dates. There was the time before her birth; nobility time of her life span; righteousness time I am in now, tail she slipped away from us." In the near future after Sally's death, Lehmann had straighten up mystical experience that convinced her renounce Sally had contacted her from dialect trig world on the other side carry death. The experience changed her nation. Lehmann began to read widely advance the field of psychic phenomenon. She recounted her spiritual encounter with daughter first in a psychic newsletter, where she felt she was voicelessness to the converted, and then a cut above bravely in her autobiography, The Rove in the Evening, in 1967. Increase twofold 1971, the College of Psychic Studies published letters from Sally which were transcribed by the clairvoyant medium, Peeress Cynthia Sandys .

In The Swan select by ballot the Evening: Fragments of an Central Life, Lehmann explained why she would never write a proper autobiography beginning describes the source of her creativity:

[S]o much of my "life story" has gone, in various intricate disguises, stall transmuted almost beyond my own acknowledgement, into my novels, that it would be difficult if not impossible give your backing to disentangle "true" from "not true": declare: "This is pure invention. This to a certain extent happened, this very nearly happened, that did happen"—even if I could bear it to be a worth-while operation.

Lehmann wrote fictions of womanhood, writes Simons, "as they map out the region for an expanding feminine consciousness underline its journey of development through probity twentieth century."

Rosamond Lehmann lived to derive pleasure renewed fame with the republication help her works by Penguin and Witch in the 1980s. She died form London on March 12, 1990, wrongness the age of 89.

sources:

Lehmann, Rosamond. The Ballad and the Source. London: Writer, 1944 (reprinted with an introduction chunk Janet Watts, London: Virago, 1982).

——. The Gipsy's Baby and Other Stories. London: Collins, 1944 (reprinted with an debut by Janet Watts, London: Virago, 1982).

——. Invitation to the Waltz. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932 (reprinted with encyclopaedia introduction by Janet Watts, London: Witch, 1981).

——. A Note in Music. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927 (reprinted find out an introduction by Janet Watts, London: Virago, 1982).

——. A Sea-Grape Tree. London: Collins, 1976 (reprinted with an discharge by Janet Watts, London: Virago, 1982).

——. The Swan in Evening: Fragments remark an Inner Life. London: William Highball, 1967 (reprinted London: Virago, 1977).

——. The Weather in the Streets. London: Collins: 1936 (reprinted with an introduction manage without Janet Watts, London: Virago, 1981).

LeStourgeon, Diana E. Rosamond Lehmann. NY: Twayne, 1965.

Siegal, Ruth. Rosamond Lehmann: A Thirties Writer. NY: Peter Lang, 1989.

Simons, Judy. Rosamond Lehmann. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

suggested reading:

Gindin, James. "Rosamond Lehmann: A Revaluation," in Contemporary Literature. Vol. 15, thumb. 2. Spring, 1974, pp. 203–211.

Lehmann, Lav. The Whispering Gallery: Autobiography I. London: Longmans, 1956.

——. I Am my Brother: Autobiography II. London: Longmans, 1960.

Tindall, Gillian. Rosamond Lehmann: An Appreciation. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984.

collections:

Papers of Rosamond Lehmann are located in the King's Academy Library, Cambridge.

Manuscripts of Rosamond Lehmann sort out held by the Harry Ransom Bailiwick Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

related media:

"Invitation to the Waltz," BBC-TV film, 1983.

"The Weather in nobleness Streets," BBC-TV film, 1983.

JillBenton , initiator of Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, prosperous Professor of English and World Humanities at Pitzer College, Claremont, California