Dusty Answer

The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers * The Times *Lehmann’s story is both universal and deliciously particular, like all the best coming-of-age stories. No one has written more brilliantly about having one’s heart broken, about despair and longing, humiliation and hope: all the wretched thrilling chaos that accompanies growing up. Finding it at fifteen felt a little like stumbling upon magic. Miraculously, all these years and re-readings later, it still has that effect on me – Harriet Lane * Independent *Beautifully written and observed, and an interesting representation of the ideas of and pressures upon a generation of intellectual women immediately after the Great War * Telegraph *[Lehman] is immensely readable, acute, passionate, funny and original – Elizabeth Jane HowardIt is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation … The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art * Sunday Times *Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters – Margaret DrabbleIt will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read – Jonathan CoeThis is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time * Spectator *Whoever loves the earth, and especially whoever loves English earth, will drink delicious draughts from this book; for not only beauty, but the ache of beauty, is alive in it * Atlantic *The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers * THE TIMES *It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read * Jonathan Coe *

Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) was born on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral, in Buckinghamshire, England, the second of four children. In 1927, a few years after graduating from the University of Cambridge, she published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to critical acclaim and instantaneous celebrity. Lehmann continued to write and publish between 1930 and 1976, penning works including The Weather in the Streets, The Ballad and the Source, and the short memoir The Swan in the Evening. Lehmann was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and remains one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century.

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