Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer
Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer (1927)
Lecture by Alison Hennegan, Women Writers Season, 24 July 2021
Blog post by Lisa Hutchins
Dusty Answer is Rosamond Lehmann's first novel, published after Chatto & Windus read her unsolicited manuscript and decided to take a chance on a young writer of great potential. Despite one glowing review from a leading critic, initial sales were unremarkable until, as Alison Hennegan explained in her latest lecture, the frank nature of the work led to an appalled reaction in some quarters. It was branded as 'semi-pagan' and 'the outpourings of a sex maniac' and her work was seen, alongside The Loom of Youth (1917) by Alec Waugh, as a corrupting influence on society and the young.
Lehmann came from a family with a strong literary and artistic strain. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a writer, editor and Liberal MP who co-founded The Granta magazine and contributed to Punch. Her brother John worked at Hogarth Press with Leonard Woolf while her sister Beatrix was a notable actor and author. Rosamond was an alumna of Girton College, Cambridge, which plays a key part in the novel. She drew admiring words from Virginia Woolf, who praised ‘her clear hard mind beating up now & again to poetry’. (Diary, 28 August 1930)
Alison told us how the novel is a dense, richly-textural work capable of supporting various readings. The most common is a female Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. Another is an example of (or a commentary on) the preoccupation of late 19th and early 20th century writers with childhood, seen through a golden haze of nostalgia. Alison also pointed to the struggle of all the major characters to gain genuine self-knowledge, the novel as an account of the sentimental education of its protagonist, Judith Earle, and as an exploration of the terra incognita of women's sexual and emotional lives. She suggested that it is a novel with two authors, Lehmann and Judith, and pointed to the constant difficulty of deciding what is real and what is imaginary, as events are relayed through Judith's unsteady perspective.
It is also a work with a hyperabundance of description of the natural world, and use of the pathetic fallacy, where non-human objects are portrayed as reflecting human emotions. Judith is sometimes unaware whether or not she speaks aloud or is heard. She makes disastrous mistakes based on what she thinks is real rather than on what is actually happening around her, causing grave misunderstandings to arise. However, Alison told us, this dual self composed of Judith's actual and imaginative selves is a sign of her status as a burgeoning author.
The semi-autobiographical novel tells of Judith's relations with a group of cousins, mostly male, who exert a group power and a near-magical glamour over Judith. One member, Charlie, is killed in the Great War at the age of 19, and Alison suggested a concordance with Percival in Woolf's The Waves. The group is incapable of expanding to admit new members, and wishes to exist in unchanging time. This desire for mastery over time is at the heart of the feeling of nostalgia, and Alison pointed out an example of Judith's desperate urge to fix time:
If only the moment could stay fixed, if their strange and thoughtful faces could enclose her safely for ever in their trance of contentment, if she could be able to want nothing from them beyond a share of their unimpassioned peace: if only these things could be, they would be best.
(Dusty Answer, Virago Press 2000, p. 88)
Alison said, however, that contentment and unimpassioned peace is the last thing these people share. The novel has powerful sexual and homoerotic overtones that exclude Judith, usually the only woman present, from the group of men. Judith seems to be in love with the whole family, but cannot read the bonds that connect them, and does not understand her place in the group. The situation is aggravated by the presence of Tony Baring, an obviously gay and intensely antagonistic character:
She remembered that Tony had been suddenly hostile; his eyes, stony and watchful had fastened on her when she came in from the veranda with Roddy […] The voices came up to her again like a reiterated warning. ‘Keep away. You are not wanted here. We are all friends, men content together. We want no female to trouble us’.
(pp. 100-1)
A little later Judith looks at Tony and Roddy standing by the fireside, with Tony's arm draped proprietorially around Roddy's shoulders, and again Tony's cold eyes will warn Judith off.
It is an open question how much Judith understands of what is happening. Julian, another cousin, is shown trying to ascertain how much she knows or realises. In the Girton section of the novel, there is no room for ambiguity, however. Judith is clearly shown in a relationship with a fellow student, a situation Lehmann could address openly as female homosexuality was never successfully criminalised. Judith's romance is even successful in diverting her attention from the cousins for a while, as their world makes less sense to her while she is thus occupied. Alison pointed out how we see two quite brutally different Cambridges, demonstrating how it remains, in the end, a place designed for and around men. The sexual apartheid highlighted by Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929; which started life as a lecture given at Girton and at Newnham in 1928) and in Three Guineas (1938) is clearly in operation:
Farewell to Cambridge, to whom she was less than nothing. She had been deluded into imagining that it bore her some affection. Under its politeness, it had disliked and distrusted her and all other females; and now it ignored her. It took its mists about it, folding within them Roddy and Tony, and all the other young men, and let her go.
(p. 302)
Alison’s lecture with photo of Beatrix Lehmann
Alison highlighted how, throughout Dusty Answer, so many brilliant young people make such a mess of clarifying their feelings and circumstances; instead, they evade and obscure. It is left to Mariella, the one largely absent female among the cousins, to clearly express what is happening in a poorly-written letter. By the end of the novel Judith begins to appreciate how to recognise reality and make accommodation with it. Leaving Cambridge, she feels she has liberated herself. Whether she has, as we leave her, remains to be seen.
Further Reading
'Alain-Fournier', Le Grand Meaulnes (1913); childhood recalled through the evocation of 'the lost domain' of a near-magical French estate.
Bennett, Joan, Virginia Woolf – her art as a novelist (Cambridge University Press, 1945). Joan Bennett was one of Lehmann's contemporaries at Girton.
Dane, Clemence (pen name of Winifred Ashton), Regiment of Women (1917, there is a Virago Lesbian Landmarks reprint with an introduction by Alison Hennegan); novel set in an English girls' school, about the eventually disastrous consequences of one young pupil's love for a teacher.
Grahame, Kenneth, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898).
Flaubert, Gustave, L'Education Sentimentale (1869)
Hastings, Selena, Rosamond Lehmann: A Life (2002)
Sinclair, May, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922); a novel charting its protagonist's life from birth to death. A writer whose influence and example Lehmann acknowledged.
Pollard, Wendy, Rosamond and her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception (2004)
Stein, Gertrude, Fernhurst (1903, there was a Virago Lesbian Landmarks reprint with an introduction by Alison Hennegan, and various other editions are available); novel based on a scandal at Bryn Mawr, the highly-regarded American women's college.
Townsend Warner, Sylvia, Summer Will Show (1936)
Waugh, Alec (older brother of Evelyn Waugh), The Loom of Youth (1917). Like Dusty Answer, the book caused great scandal on its first publication. Strongly autobiographical, it deals with the sexual life of the boys at an English public school, modelled on Waugh's own school, Sherborne.
Winsloe, Christa, Mädchen in Uniform (Schoolgirls in Uniform), a play and later a film about a girls' school run on militaristic lines, where only the love between one teacher and her pupils counters the institution's brutalism.
- The Child Manuela (1934); the novel of the play (there is a Virago Lesbian Landmarks edition with an introduction by Alison Hennegan).
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (1929)
- The Waves (1931)
- Diary
- Three Guineas (1938)
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The Literature Cambridge Women Writers Season continues with sessions on Zora Neale Hurston, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby, and more.
