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The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life
Rosamond Lehmann, one of the most distinguished British writers of this century, published eight acclaimed works of fiction. Her only autobiographical work, The Swan in the Evening, recreated first the child she was and the experiences that made her the woman she became, moving on to tell the story of her beloved daughter Sally and the tragedy of her early death at the age of twenty-four.
Then, tentatively and persuasively, Rosamond Lehmann relates the totally unexpected, overwhelming, and scrupulously recorded psychic and mystical experiences she underwent following that terrible loss. The meaning of such events, their messages of hope and comfort to others, she then, through a letter to her grandaughter, passes to us.
For this revised edition Rosamond Lehmann has written an epilogue in which, at the age of eighty-one, she looks back on these experiences, and examines the responses she received upon the book's first publication in 1967. In her own words it is 'my last testament. What else is left that I might say?' The Swan in the Evening, published here in paperback for the first time, is both the personal memoir of a great writer and a rare and important spiritual autobiography.
Then, tentatively and persuasively, Rosamond Lehmann relates the totally unexpected, overwhelming, and scrupulously recorded psychic and mystical experiences she underwent following that terrible loss. The meaning of such events, their messages of hope and comfort to others, she then, through a letter to her grandaughter, passes to us.
For this revised edition Rosamond Lehmann has written an epilogue in which, at the age of eighty-one, she looks back on these experiences, and examines the responses she received upon the book's first publication in 1967. In her own words it is 'my last testament. What else is left that I might say?' The Swan in the Evening, published here in paperback for the first time, is both the personal memoir of a great writer and a rare and important spiritual autobiography.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
Rosamond Lehmann
44 books131 followersRosamond 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; one of her two sisters 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. In December 1923 she married Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford) (1900-1989), and the couple went to live in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1927 and were divorced later that year.
In 1927, Lehmann published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to great critical and popular acclaim. The novel's heroine, Judith, is attracted to both men and women, and interacts with fairly openly gay and lesbian characters during her years at Cambridge. The novel was a succès de scandale. Though none of her later novels were as successful as her first, Lehmann went on to publish six more novels, a play (No More Music, 1939), a collection of short stories (The Gypsy's Baby & Other Stories, 1946), a spiritual autobiography (The Swan in the Evening, 1967), and a photographic memoir of her friends (Rosamond Lehmann's Album, 1985), many of whom were famous Bloomsbury figures such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Carrington, and Lytton Strachey. She also translated two French novels into English: Jacques Lemarchand's Genevieve (1948) and Jean Cocteau's Children of the Game (1955). Her novels include A Note in Music (1930), Invitation to the Waltz (1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Ballad and the Source (1944), The Echoing Grove (1953), and A Sea-Grape Tree (1976).
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 helped edit and 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.
Her 1953 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.
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.
Lehmann was awarded the CBE in 1982 and died at Clareville Grove, London on 12 March 1990, aged 89.
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. In December 1923 she married Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford) (1900-1989), and the couple went to live in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1927 and were divorced later that year.
In 1927, Lehmann published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to great critical and popular acclaim. The novel's heroine, Judith, is attracted to both men and women, and interacts with fairly openly gay and lesbian characters during her years at Cambridge. The novel was a succès de scandale. Though none of her later novels were as successful as her first, Lehmann went on to publish six more novels, a play (No More Music, 1939), a collection of short stories (The Gypsy's Baby & Other Stories, 1946), a spiritual autobiography (The Swan in the Evening, 1967), and a photographic memoir of her friends (Rosamond Lehmann's Album, 1985), many of whom were famous Bloomsbury figures such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Carrington, and Lytton Strachey. She also translated two French novels into English: Jacques Lemarchand's Genevieve (1948) and Jean Cocteau's Children of the Game (1955). Her novels include A Note in Music (1930), Invitation to the Waltz (1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Ballad and the Source (1944), The Echoing Grove (1953), and A Sea-Grape Tree (1976).
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 helped edit and 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.
Her 1953 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.
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.
Lehmann was awarded the CBE in 1982 and died at Clareville Grove, London on 12 March 1990, aged 89.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 14, 2016
Rosamond Lehman was like the Zadie Smith of the 1920s – young and beautiful when her first novel was published she immediately enjoyed literary stardom. She went on to write another half dozen or so novels, culminating in what is arguably her best novel, The Echoing Grove. Then her daughter died and so deep was her grief that Lehman didn’t write any more novels. The Swan in the Evening was published after ten years of silence on her part.
It should be said this isn’t really autobiography in the conventional sense. The first section is a series of isolated childhood vignettes, reminiscent in mood and form to Virginia Woolf’s idea that we all have a handful of defining childhood moments, moments of being. These reminded me of the lithe beauty of Lehman’s prose, the romantic lyricism of her descriptive writing. Lehman was always brilliant at dramatising the emotional life of her heroines. At the same time there’s a kind of detachment about these memories as if Lehman is the novelist at work and these are sketches for a character in a book.
The second section concerns itself largely with her daughter Sally. A parent extolling the virtues of her offspring is always going to cause some embarrassment on the part of a listener who never knew the person in question. The sludge of grief begins to suck both vitality and clarity from the prose. You begin to sense Lehman still hasn’t effectively dealt with her grief and the writing of this book is another attempt.
The third part makes for distinctly uncomfortable reading. In fact I couldn’t get through it. Lehman refuses to believe her daughter is dead. Spiritualism has taken over her life. She recounts a few moments when she is reunited with her daughter. Apparently her old Bloomsbury friends dropped her at this point in her life. They couldn’t countenance her ideas. The impression she wants to give is that she’s been born again. However it isn’t convincing. The writing becomes increasingly muddled and bogged down by the ugly terminology of psychic experience. She protests too much about the healing qualities of her mystical experiences. She appears as precariously balanced as a recovering addict addressing an audience for the first time. Perhaps the encrypted text of this book is an inadvertent exposition as to why she was unable to write fiction after the death of her daughter. In fact the more mystical the text becomes the more slumbering and awkward becomes the prose. It lacks the easy grace of imaginative lucidity. It becomes clear she’s lost the clarity of detachment necessary to write fiction. While I can understand her writing this book I’m not sure she should have published it. It’s too personal. Too subjectively needy and distressed. It reads like a testament to the harrowing distorting properties of grief, a hurricane that lifts the roof off a home. Ultimately you’re left with the feeling Rosamond Lehman, very sadly, was never able to recover from her grief.
If however you want to experience Lehman at her best I recommend The Echoing Grove.
It should be said this isn’t really autobiography in the conventional sense. The first section is a series of isolated childhood vignettes, reminiscent in mood and form to Virginia Woolf’s idea that we all have a handful of defining childhood moments, moments of being. These reminded me of the lithe beauty of Lehman’s prose, the romantic lyricism of her descriptive writing. Lehman was always brilliant at dramatising the emotional life of her heroines. At the same time there’s a kind of detachment about these memories as if Lehman is the novelist at work and these are sketches for a character in a book.
The second section concerns itself largely with her daughter Sally. A parent extolling the virtues of her offspring is always going to cause some embarrassment on the part of a listener who never knew the person in question. The sludge of grief begins to suck both vitality and clarity from the prose. You begin to sense Lehman still hasn’t effectively dealt with her grief and the writing of this book is another attempt.
The third part makes for distinctly uncomfortable reading. In fact I couldn’t get through it. Lehman refuses to believe her daughter is dead. Spiritualism has taken over her life. She recounts a few moments when she is reunited with her daughter. Apparently her old Bloomsbury friends dropped her at this point in her life. They couldn’t countenance her ideas. The impression she wants to give is that she’s been born again. However it isn’t convincing. The writing becomes increasingly muddled and bogged down by the ugly terminology of psychic experience. She protests too much about the healing qualities of her mystical experiences. She appears as precariously balanced as a recovering addict addressing an audience for the first time. Perhaps the encrypted text of this book is an inadvertent exposition as to why she was unable to write fiction after the death of her daughter. In fact the more mystical the text becomes the more slumbering and awkward becomes the prose. It lacks the easy grace of imaginative lucidity. It becomes clear she’s lost the clarity of detachment necessary to write fiction. While I can understand her writing this book I’m not sure she should have published it. It’s too personal. Too subjectively needy and distressed. It reads like a testament to the harrowing distorting properties of grief, a hurricane that lifts the roof off a home. Ultimately you’re left with the feeling Rosamond Lehman, very sadly, was never able to recover from her grief.
If however you want to experience Lehman at her best I recommend The Echoing Grove.
June 6, 2021
The first two sections are just wonderfully done. The final, dealing with her experience of psychic phenomena/spiritualism after the death of her daughter, less so for me, though that is more to do with my opinions about such things.
April 15, 2013
Rosamond Lehmann (1901 – 1990) was a very distinguished British novelist who wrote eight works of fiction, seven novels and volume of short stories, of which I still have two to read. I really loved these books, one of which I have read twice and also enjoyed Selina Hasting’s biography (although she doesn’t come out of that book quite so well). I was therefore quite keen to read this book – Rosamond Lehmann’s only work of autobiography, however I must admit to approaching it with some slight trepidation. I was nervous of it I suppose, because I knew from the blurb that it relates Rosamond Lehmann’s psychic experiences that followed the death of her beloved daughter Sally in 1958. Now when it comes to all things psychic and spiritual I am not exactly what could be called a believer. However I do believe that things can happen to people that are difficult for the rest of us to understand, call it self-deceit or call it spiritualism it is no doubt real to them.
The Swan in the Evening is told in three sections , the first section about Rosamond’s childhood, the second section sets out her relationship with her daughter Sally, the third section is about the time following Sally’s death and Rosamond’s unexpected psychical experiences. I found the first two section’s very readable, written with Rosamond Lehmann’s beautiful gift for prose, the descriptions of Rosamond’s childhood quite poignant. Death is always present in this little book, in the first section of the book Rosamond tells of her family’s stableman William Moody – who’s adored little daughter Wilma died tragically of diphtheria – Moody’s grief so terrible and so memorable to her all those years later. Young Rosie was often concerned with death, the risk to pets and the demise of birds, trying to save them from raspberry nets and creating a little bird hospital. Beautiful Dora from the local sweet shop is murdered, which little Rosamond discovers only after having run there on a Wednesday to find the shop unaccountably closed.
I suspect that following the death of her daughter Rosamond Lehmann placed greater importance on events from the past – giving them the status almost of omens. Thus perhaps do the bereaved sometimes lie to themselves.
“Since Sally was nearly always in my thoughts it is no wonder that, as I prepared for bed in my hotel room, looking out over the sea towards the lights of the mainland opposite, another memory of her should have slipped, very quietly and clearly, into the forefront of my mind. Once, when she was five years old, as we walked together on the downs above Compton in Berkshire where we spent the war years she said, without the slightest warning:
‘One day…one day..’
‘What about one day?’
‘One day I might call you and call you and call you over the whole world. Over the whole world, and you might not answer. What shall I do then? Her voice seemed to toll. Taken aback, I quickly promised her that I would always answer.”
Rosamond Lehmann had two children, Hugo and Sarah known as Sally, but she seems to have a particularly close relationship with her daughter. The portrait that is painted of this relationship, and the dreadful tragedy of Sally’s death is very moving, Rosamond’s grief was naturally extreme.
“All the details I treasure of her beauty – the ravishing lines of her lips in smiling (the archaic smile –she really had it – its mysteriously subtle curve), her rather gliding walk, her odd slow buoyant grace when she danced, the something unforgettable about the modelling of her eyes and eyelids – their extended outer corners, the grey-blue large iris flecked with green, the cut of the luminous lids, like segments of magnolia petal …such images seem to set her in an antique world; in some golden age of plastic and poetic harmony, meaning beauty; startling me now only a little more profoundly than they always did.”
So although I admit I found the psychic element slightly disturbing and odd – making me re-evaluate a woman whose work I admire enormously, the whole book I found strangely beguiling and hard to put down. That though, is almost certainly because it was after all written by Rosamond Lehmann – and I just love the way that she writes. As I mentioned above – the Rosamond Lehmann who emerged from Selina Hasting’s biography is not a woman I would find it easy to sympathise with – selfish shallow indulging in affairs which she put ahead of her family, but although I find the woman who emerges from A Swan in the Evening, to be someone who thinks very differently from me – I do find her surprisingly likeable, and I am glad of that.
The Swan in the Evening is told in three sections , the first section about Rosamond’s childhood, the second section sets out her relationship with her daughter Sally, the third section is about the time following Sally’s death and Rosamond’s unexpected psychical experiences. I found the first two section’s very readable, written with Rosamond Lehmann’s beautiful gift for prose, the descriptions of Rosamond’s childhood quite poignant. Death is always present in this little book, in the first section of the book Rosamond tells of her family’s stableman William Moody – who’s adored little daughter Wilma died tragically of diphtheria – Moody’s grief so terrible and so memorable to her all those years later. Young Rosie was often concerned with death, the risk to pets and the demise of birds, trying to save them from raspberry nets and creating a little bird hospital. Beautiful Dora from the local sweet shop is murdered, which little Rosamond discovers only after having run there on a Wednesday to find the shop unaccountably closed.
I suspect that following the death of her daughter Rosamond Lehmann placed greater importance on events from the past – giving them the status almost of omens. Thus perhaps do the bereaved sometimes lie to themselves.
“Since Sally was nearly always in my thoughts it is no wonder that, as I prepared for bed in my hotel room, looking out over the sea towards the lights of the mainland opposite, another memory of her should have slipped, very quietly and clearly, into the forefront of my mind. Once, when she was five years old, as we walked together on the downs above Compton in Berkshire where we spent the war years she said, without the slightest warning:
‘One day…one day..’
‘What about one day?’
‘One day I might call you and call you and call you over the whole world. Over the whole world, and you might not answer. What shall I do then? Her voice seemed to toll. Taken aback, I quickly promised her that I would always answer.”
Rosamond Lehmann had two children, Hugo and Sarah known as Sally, but she seems to have a particularly close relationship with her daughter. The portrait that is painted of this relationship, and the dreadful tragedy of Sally’s death is very moving, Rosamond’s grief was naturally extreme.
“All the details I treasure of her beauty – the ravishing lines of her lips in smiling (the archaic smile –she really had it – its mysteriously subtle curve), her rather gliding walk, her odd slow buoyant grace when she danced, the something unforgettable about the modelling of her eyes and eyelids – their extended outer corners, the grey-blue large iris flecked with green, the cut of the luminous lids, like segments of magnolia petal …such images seem to set her in an antique world; in some golden age of plastic and poetic harmony, meaning beauty; startling me now only a little more profoundly than they always did.”
So although I admit I found the psychic element slightly disturbing and odd – making me re-evaluate a woman whose work I admire enormously, the whole book I found strangely beguiling and hard to put down. That though, is almost certainly because it was after all written by Rosamond Lehmann – and I just love the way that she writes. As I mentioned above – the Rosamond Lehmann who emerged from Selina Hasting’s biography is not a woman I would find it easy to sympathise with – selfish shallow indulging in affairs which she put ahead of her family, but although I find the woman who emerges from A Swan in the Evening, to be someone who thinks very differently from me – I do find her surprisingly likeable, and I am glad of that.
January 14, 2023
No es esta una reseña sencilla. Primero, porque El cisne en el ocaso no es en absoluto el tipo de libro que solemos traer a este espacio (aunque aquí nos atrevemos con todo). Segundo, porque, dentro de la subjetividad de cada lector o reseñador —ya he dicho aquí alguna vez que debemos tender a la máxima objetividad aunque ello parezca contradictorio—, este libro pertenece a ese tipo de obras cuya valoración cambiará ostensiblemente de una persona a otra, ya que estamos ante un título tremendamente personal y con un tono muy marcado.
Hablo de libro, no de novela, ya que El cisne en el ocaso transita entre la narrativa y el libro de memorias, quizá tendiendo más a esto último. Rosamond Lehmann se dedica a abarcar en la obra buena parte de su vida, ofreciendo una mirada que orbita siempre sobre un foco fundamental y omnipresente: el temprano fallecimiento de su hija Sally.
La narración de la autora se fragmenta en tres partes. En la primera asistimos a la infancia, en un fascinante ejercicio retrospectivo que, sin embargo, puede ser el más pesado de la obra. La segunda parte, vertebral y breve, mira directamente hacia el momento de la muerte de Sally. En la tercera, se nos narra todo lo que sucedió después y cómo Lehmann encontró paz en ciertas doctrinas para lidiar con la tragedia.
Reseña completa en https://dentrodelmonolito.com/2022/09...
Hablo de libro, no de novela, ya que El cisne en el ocaso transita entre la narrativa y el libro de memorias, quizá tendiendo más a esto último. Rosamond Lehmann se dedica a abarcar en la obra buena parte de su vida, ofreciendo una mirada que orbita siempre sobre un foco fundamental y omnipresente: el temprano fallecimiento de su hija Sally.
La narración de la autora se fragmenta en tres partes. En la primera asistimos a la infancia, en un fascinante ejercicio retrospectivo que, sin embargo, puede ser el más pesado de la obra. La segunda parte, vertebral y breve, mira directamente hacia el momento de la muerte de Sally. En la tercera, se nos narra todo lo que sucedió después y cómo Lehmann encontró paz en ciertas doctrinas para lidiar con la tragedia.
Reseña completa en https://dentrodelmonolito.com/2022/09...
June 23, 2025
A grieving mother finds comfort in "evidence of survival."
I have some difficulty assessing this book because it both is and isn't "my kind of book." I almost always enjoy memoirs by writers, even writers whose work I haven't read and don't intend to . Many writers share a way of looking at life that I find sympathetic.
On the other hand, I am not interested in the paranormal or in speculations about the after-life. If I had read the author's description of this book as being a "spiritual autobiography" I would have passed on it. I'm glad I didn't.
Rosamond Lehmann was a popular English writer of novels and stories from 1927 when her first novel created a sensation by featuring a bi-sexual heroine. She was part of the "Bloomsbury Set" along with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf. She was a professional woman, but one with an active private life. She married two gentlemen with titles. Her second husband and the father of her two children was the only member of the Communist Party to ever serve in the House of Lords. After her second marriage ended, she stayed single but had several high-profile affairs, including a lengthy one with poet Cecil Day-Lewis. (Known to some of us as mystery writer "Nicolas Blake.")
The first part of the book concerns her childhood in a well-to-do family with literary, artistic, and theatrical connections. It's a loving-but-unsparing look at a family where the parents were glamorous and exciting, but very little involved in the day-to-day care of their children. The servants (good and bad) were the important figures in the children's lives.
Then the book shifts (abruptly, I think) to the death of the author's daughter. Sally was a very young woman - vibrant and as sensitive as her mother - who had gone to Jakarta, Indonesia to live with her husband. She contracted polio and died suddenly. When I saw the date of her death (1958) I immediately thought of my family going on a Sunday afternoon to a local school to line up for sugar cubes that had been impregnated with the polio vaccine. I date that memory to the late 1950's and that must be correct because soon after her daughter's death the author was taunted by cars with loud-speakers driving through her neighborhood encouraging young people to be vaccinated against polio.
She writes poignantly about her daughter's death and her own grief. One sentence that struck me forcibly was her memory of her life at the time as "crawling... through stone streets filled with other people's daughters." It's a heart-felt and very apt description of the weight of grief and of the bitter jealousy that accompanies the death of a loved one. After my mother's death I found myself resenting those who still had a living mother.
Raised by agnostics and surrounded by those who regarded religion as stultifying and superstitious, she craved the solace of believing that her daughter lived on. I skipped over her discussion of the metaphysical books she studied and the mediums she consulted. I'm not so much a disbeliever as uninterested. However, I agree with her that it's ironic and sad that many Christians cruelly condemn those who grieve for their dead and search for answers in "alternative" philosophies. We all know that spiritualism has been abused by charlatans and frauds, but Christianity itself has been hi-jacked by some unsavory types, too.
I was deeply interested in her accounts of her dreams about her daughter. I've experienced such dreams myself about dead loved ones and read about others having them. I call them "comfort dreams" because the dreamer is aware that the other person is dead, but is comforted by their presence. Is this evidence that the dead are hovering around us or is it a "trick" that our subconscious plays on us while we sleep? In the end, my feeling is that anything that helps a grieving person is of value.
I'm glad I read this book. Lehmann was a fine writer and she managed to write about the tragedy of her daughter's early death without being maudlin or sentimental. The book is dedicated to her oldest granddaughter Anna, who was a small child when her young aunt died. The middle-aged mother and the little granddaughter comforted each other and forged a strong bond. The last chapter is a "letter" to Anna and to the author's younger grandchildren, impressing on them that love is the one thing that ALWAYS survives. That's why it's the only thing of real importance, as this mother's story makes clear.
I have some difficulty assessing this book because it both is and isn't "my kind of book." I almost always enjoy memoirs by writers, even writers whose work I haven't read and don't intend to . Many writers share a way of looking at life that I find sympathetic.
On the other hand, I am not interested in the paranormal or in speculations about the after-life. If I had read the author's description of this book as being a "spiritual autobiography" I would have passed on it. I'm glad I didn't.
Rosamond Lehmann was a popular English writer of novels and stories from 1927 when her first novel created a sensation by featuring a bi-sexual heroine. She was part of the "Bloomsbury Set" along with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf. She was a professional woman, but one with an active private life. She married two gentlemen with titles. Her second husband and the father of her two children was the only member of the Communist Party to ever serve in the House of Lords. After her second marriage ended, she stayed single but had several high-profile affairs, including a lengthy one with poet Cecil Day-Lewis. (Known to some of us as mystery writer "Nicolas Blake.")
The first part of the book concerns her childhood in a well-to-do family with literary, artistic, and theatrical connections. It's a loving-but-unsparing look at a family where the parents were glamorous and exciting, but very little involved in the day-to-day care of their children. The servants (good and bad) were the important figures in the children's lives.
Then the book shifts (abruptly, I think) to the death of the author's daughter. Sally was a very young woman - vibrant and as sensitive as her mother - who had gone to Jakarta, Indonesia to live with her husband. She contracted polio and died suddenly. When I saw the date of her death (1958) I immediately thought of my family going on a Sunday afternoon to a local school to line up for sugar cubes that had been impregnated with the polio vaccine. I date that memory to the late 1950's and that must be correct because soon after her daughter's death the author was taunted by cars with loud-speakers driving through her neighborhood encouraging young people to be vaccinated against polio.
She writes poignantly about her daughter's death and her own grief. One sentence that struck me forcibly was her memory of her life at the time as "crawling... through stone streets filled with other people's daughters." It's a heart-felt and very apt description of the weight of grief and of the bitter jealousy that accompanies the death of a loved one. After my mother's death I found myself resenting those who still had a living mother.
Raised by agnostics and surrounded by those who regarded religion as stultifying and superstitious, she craved the solace of believing that her daughter lived on. I skipped over her discussion of the metaphysical books she studied and the mediums she consulted. I'm not so much a disbeliever as uninterested. However, I agree with her that it's ironic and sad that many Christians cruelly condemn those who grieve for their dead and search for answers in "alternative" philosophies. We all know that spiritualism has been abused by charlatans and frauds, but Christianity itself has been hi-jacked by some unsavory types, too.
I was deeply interested in her accounts of her dreams about her daughter. I've experienced such dreams myself about dead loved ones and read about others having them. I call them "comfort dreams" because the dreamer is aware that the other person is dead, but is comforted by their presence. Is this evidence that the dead are hovering around us or is it a "trick" that our subconscious plays on us while we sleep? In the end, my feeling is that anything that helps a grieving person is of value.
I'm glad I read this book. Lehmann was a fine writer and she managed to write about the tragedy of her daughter's early death without being maudlin or sentimental. The book is dedicated to her oldest granddaughter Anna, who was a small child when her young aunt died. The middle-aged mother and the little granddaughter comforted each other and forged a strong bond. The last chapter is a "letter" to Anna and to the author's younger grandchildren, impressing on them that love is the one thing that ALWAYS survives. That's why it's the only thing of real importance, as this mother's story makes clear.
March 16, 2021
I’m re reading this and it packs more of a punch this time around.
Lots of highlighting and underlining in battered old copy..
Lots of highlighting and underlining in battered old copy..
July 19, 2022
The back of this book tells us that "Rosamund Lehmann, one of the most distinguished British writers of this century..." (ie the twentieth century). Eh? I don't know whether this is another big gap in my literary knowledge, or just another case of publisher's spiel, but I had never heard of her before I picked up this book second hand. Thought it looked curious. And having read it, part of me is curious to try one of her fiction books, another part is keen to avoid anything else by her.
Harsh?
It's an odd memoir and I don't know how well you can get to grasps with her life. It starts off interesting and relatable to an extent, going through random anecdotes of childhood, and experiences and feelings we can relate to even though she was born right at the start of the 1900s. But she was born in an intensely priviledged position, down in the home counties in England, on what sounds like a country estate. Who grows up in a home that employs a stableman and a boat man?? (for the river boats). She briefly mentions her writing and mentions in response to her first book she got a lot of letters from lesbians offering her a home, and a French guy who sat on a mountain, wrote a whole novel in reply to hers, with photographs, and sent it to her. That sounds very curious, but she doesn't say much more on that or her writing career at all.
Mostly this is a book about grief and how it never leaves you. Her daughter, Sally, died in Indonesia when she was only 24 - no idea what from, but gleaned from between the lines I think it must have been very sudden and unexpected. And I say grief but I don't think Lehmann would agree. The bulk of this book is a lot of navel gazing on the subject of spiritualism, clairvoyants, mystiscism and all that jazz, and the fact that she is 100% convinced that you don't die after death but inhabit a "body" made up of lighter material and that Sally has been in her life ever since she died. Well, we all believe what we believe, who am I to question this (although it did get boring to read), and if it helped her cope with her grief and the rest of the life, fine, just as long as con-artists weren't making too much money and taking too much advantage out of her. But as well as getting waffling and a bit dull, it goes with the line that attack is the best form of defence and she is very aggressive towards anyone who might question what she writes. The edition I have was printed in the 1980s - this was originally published in the 60s - and she includes a response to a letter she wrote to a reviewer who didn't completely agree with her world view. Seems like the reviewer was polite and open minded to a point, although she didn't agree with everything. But the language Lehmann uses makes it sound like a personal attack. Which on the whole does not present a picture of someone wholy confident with what they are saying, if they're paranoid about what everyone else might say about them. Maybe she felt she had a right to be paranoid? I don't know. Let's just say this really wasn't my bag.
Don't agree with her? It's your own fault and stupidity:
On her mystical revelations: "And all this that I was so avidly searching out and drinking in was not a modern discovery! - simply a contemporary, more scientific (and sometimes far less noble) restatement of truths known from the beginnings of recorded history. If modern atheists, or philosophical materialists, rejected them, relegated them to the realm of childish things outgrown, perhaps they were blinded by intellectual arrogance; perhaps they deliberately, perversely, chose to remain blinkered, not to inform themselves." ( p 127).
Thing is, if you're desperate for something to be true, you can get the facts to fit the predecided truth.
Ah, definately not my cup of tea, one to pass on.
Harsh?
It's an odd memoir and I don't know how well you can get to grasps with her life. It starts off interesting and relatable to an extent, going through random anecdotes of childhood, and experiences and feelings we can relate to even though she was born right at the start of the 1900s. But she was born in an intensely priviledged position, down in the home counties in England, on what sounds like a country estate. Who grows up in a home that employs a stableman and a boat man?? (for the river boats). She briefly mentions her writing and mentions in response to her first book she got a lot of letters from lesbians offering her a home, and a French guy who sat on a mountain, wrote a whole novel in reply to hers, with photographs, and sent it to her. That sounds very curious, but she doesn't say much more on that or her writing career at all.
Mostly this is a book about grief and how it never leaves you. Her daughter, Sally, died in Indonesia when she was only 24 - no idea what from, but gleaned from between the lines I think it must have been very sudden and unexpected. And I say grief but I don't think Lehmann would agree. The bulk of this book is a lot of navel gazing on the subject of spiritualism, clairvoyants, mystiscism and all that jazz, and the fact that she is 100% convinced that you don't die after death but inhabit a "body" made up of lighter material and that Sally has been in her life ever since she died. Well, we all believe what we believe, who am I to question this (although it did get boring to read), and if it helped her cope with her grief and the rest of the life, fine, just as long as con-artists weren't making too much money and taking too much advantage out of her. But as well as getting waffling and a bit dull, it goes with the line that attack is the best form of defence and she is very aggressive towards anyone who might question what she writes. The edition I have was printed in the 1980s - this was originally published in the 60s - and she includes a response to a letter she wrote to a reviewer who didn't completely agree with her world view. Seems like the reviewer was polite and open minded to a point, although she didn't agree with everything. But the language Lehmann uses makes it sound like a personal attack. Which on the whole does not present a picture of someone wholy confident with what they are saying, if they're paranoid about what everyone else might say about them. Maybe she felt she had a right to be paranoid? I don't know. Let's just say this really wasn't my bag.
Don't agree with her? It's your own fault and stupidity:
On her mystical revelations: "And all this that I was so avidly searching out and drinking in was not a modern discovery! - simply a contemporary, more scientific (and sometimes far less noble) restatement of truths known from the beginnings of recorded history. If modern atheists, or philosophical materialists, rejected them, relegated them to the realm of childish things outgrown, perhaps they were blinded by intellectual arrogance; perhaps they deliberately, perversely, chose to remain blinkered, not to inform themselves." ( p 127).
Thing is, if you're desperate for something to be true, you can get the facts to fit the predecided truth.
Ah, definately not my cup of tea, one to pass on.
December 31, 2021
Lehmann's memoir, notionally in three parts (as suggested to her by Laurens van den Post), is centrally preoccupied by her grief at the death of her daughter Sally, who died at twenty-four. She caught polio, just a year before vaccinations began to be rolled out, in Java. Sally was an exceptional individual, for one of her Oxford tutors the 'goodest' and for another 'the most beautiful' character she had ever met; she was particularly simple and stubborn, though not unsophisticated, taking up the cause of cripples and unfortunates, of salmon she thought it cruel as a child to catch and of animals she declined to eat. She had a fine soprano voice, which she didn't use in case it limited her, and a 'Scholarship' mind, although the excitement of being belle of the ball at Oxford meant she just missed a First. She was plain in glasses and grew into long legs and a slim-waisted figure. Her husband, to emerge as the man of letters Patrick Kavanagh, wrote his own memoir of her.
'Lacerated beyond almost all bearing' at her loss, Lehmann finds comfort in spiritualist beliefs that the soul at death is not extinguished. Sally is not dead (though, in one sense, she is; her spirit has left the earthly world and resists and grumbles) but has passed to another plane of being. She returns to solace her mother, who smells syringa or honeysuckle outside her Georgian London house and sees the same 'diffusion of the blue ray' seen by Jung. Critics like Cyril Connolly and Arnold Toynbee are kind to her distress and praise the artistry (the condensation and sensory sensitivity) of the memoir; but, reading in between the lines, one senses that she has burned the bridges with some of her rationalist fellow Bloomsbury-type intellectuals. The memoir ends with a letter to her granddaughter Anna, a child, affirming her spiritualism; the opening was well-caught, and always well-turned, recollections of childhood (being caught up in a flurry of 'buttons, brooches, dentures, watch-chains' and kissed by a sour-smelling whiskery cheek).
'Lacerated beyond almost all bearing' at her loss, Lehmann finds comfort in spiritualist beliefs that the soul at death is not extinguished. Sally is not dead (though, in one sense, she is; her spirit has left the earthly world and resists and grumbles) but has passed to another plane of being. She returns to solace her mother, who smells syringa or honeysuckle outside her Georgian London house and sees the same 'diffusion of the blue ray' seen by Jung. Critics like Cyril Connolly and Arnold Toynbee are kind to her distress and praise the artistry (the condensation and sensory sensitivity) of the memoir; but, reading in between the lines, one senses that she has burned the bridges with some of her rationalist fellow Bloomsbury-type intellectuals. The memoir ends with a letter to her granddaughter Anna, a child, affirming her spiritualism; the opening was well-caught, and always well-turned, recollections of childhood (being caught up in a flurry of 'buttons, brooches, dentures, watch-chains' and kissed by a sour-smelling whiskery cheek).
September 21, 2023
Oh, I thought I was going to love this but I struggled to finish it. I think I'm not good with fragments as I did not enjoy Katherine Mansfield's fragmented journal either and I usually love writers' memoirs and journals. There were wonderful lines here and there that I underlined. I've never read her fiction and am not sure I ever will. Did I find her writing boring? I am not sure but this slim book felt very long indeed. And it is not because I clashed with her spiritualism, I had no problem with that. Also, I felt that Lehmann was a genuinely nice person. I would have loved a proper autobiography, about her work and her broken marriages and so on. I guess, for me, there was a bit of a clash between what she thought was most important about her life and what I would have preferred to learn about.
October 26, 2020
This felt like a very true and honest book, detailing the grief of a mother for her daughter. It was very much of the same school as Isabelle Allende's "Paula", which resonated with me in a way this book didn't. The later part of the book details coming to terms with deep grief through spiritualism, it was very sincere and very clearly a process that made a very great difference to the writer, but which I found slightly off putting (perhaps unfairly).
November 4, 2025
This book is about how the author came to terms with incredible grief by turning to spiritualism. I can’t imagine consoling myself in this way, but one doesn’t know how they will process such grief unless one experiences such a loss.
What I found deeply moving about this book were the beautiful and poetic passages about her daughter in Part III, because like the author, I have a boundless love for and feel a true connectedness with my daughter.
What I found deeply moving about this book were the beautiful and poetic passages about her daughter in Part III, because like the author, I have a boundless love for and feel a true connectedness with my daughter.
January 4, 2017
The only letter from Beatrix that Rosamond kept in her archives for the 60s and 70s was one telling her how much she loved this book! I'm guessing the other ones mentioned her girlfriend so Rosamond didn't want them kept. I heard the sisters had had a falling out over Rosamond's turning to spirtualism on the death of her daughter. But it seemed that Bea still enjoyed this book.
I found it useful for the first part that talked about their upbringing. It came across as very posh, and a little bit snobby! But interesting background on the family nonetheless. It is interesting that both John and Rosamond published writing about their childhoods whereas Bea didn't even want to discuss it in interviews saying it was "typical".
The second part of the book focused on loosing her daughter and the third part on her belief that life continued after death. As someone whose lost someone recently I was hoping that this part would be more comforting, but it did just seem to be dreams and sceances. But I'm glad I read it as it's useful research.
I found it useful for the first part that talked about their upbringing. It came across as very posh, and a little bit snobby! But interesting background on the family nonetheless. It is interesting that both John and Rosamond published writing about their childhoods whereas Bea didn't even want to discuss it in interviews saying it was "typical".
The second part of the book focused on loosing her daughter and the third part on her belief that life continued after death. As someone whose lost someone recently I was hoping that this part would be more comforting, but it did just seem to be dreams and sceances. But I'm glad I read it as it's useful research.
November 6, 2012
I laove Rosamond Lehmann's novels, but this memoir is not very insightful and, frankly, only intermittently interesting. She spends an inordinate amount of time and space writing about her attempts to make spiritual contact with her daughter, who died early in her adult life. I can recommend the book only to Lehmann completists.
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