Rosamond Lehmann

Who better than Selina Hastings, author of highly praised biographies of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, to write the biography of Rosamond Lehmann? Her mother, Margaret Lane, was one of the novelist's friends and Hastings herself had long admired her oeuvre. She was given access to Lehmann's large collection of personal letters and was able to tape hours of conversation with her. The result is a detailed, highly readable history which is as romantic, dramatic and beautifully written as Lehmann's own works. Rosamond Lehmann's last long novel, The Echoing Grove, featured two sisters, one free-thinking and free-living, the other more conventional and bourgeois, needing the protection of marriage and position. Both reflect aspects of Lehmann's own character. The beautiful daughter of enlightened and gifted parents, Rosamond enjoyed an idyllic and privileged childhood with her two sisters, Helen and Beatrix, and brother John. She adored her handsome father but felt that although she had inherited his love of writing he loved her the least. Selina Hastings suggests that this insecurity led her, throughout her life, to crave and demand devotion, setting up, inevitably, a constant pattern of love, betrayal and loss. Even her actress sister Beatrix, who loved her dearly, labelled her 'a tremendous ego'. Selina Hastings traces the sad story of her marriages and love affairs, the most devastating of which was her long relationship with the poet C Day Lewis, and she analyses how the familiar themes of adoration and desertion were translated into fiction. She wrote relatively few novels but from the publication of her first book, Dusty Answer, she enjoyed both critical and popular success, receiving letters mainly from women who recognized, in her characters, their own emotional experiences. Her needy, rather passive women and good-looking, dashing men were the stuff of many romantic novels but her poetic prose, ironic humour and the way she wrote fearlessly about what were then shocking themes made her books unique and earned her a well-deserved boost in sales when her books were re-issued under the Virago imprint. Her last and most devastating loss came with the death of her daughter, Sally, a bereavement which drew her into a study of spiritualism and inspired her last, moving book, The Swan in the Evening. A tremendously interesting biography, as well as being a portrait of a writer this conveys the spirit of the English social and literary scene from the First World War to the 1980s. (Kirkus UK)