Backlisted - The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

Novelist and writer Elizabeth Day joins John & Andy to discuss Rosamond Lehmann's 1936 novel of a young woman's affair with a married man. Also featured: Magnus Mills record store day novel 'The Forensic Record Society' and Clover Stroud's memoir 'The Wild Other'.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)5'06 - The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills10'26 - The Wild Other by Clover Stroud14'41 - The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. I was asked to take part in the Museum of Curiosity, which is a Radio 4 panel show, last weekend. And I was asked at quite short notice. It did rather suggest to me that somebody had dropped out.

But, of course, you've never turned down a gig. So I was so thrilled. And also, the Museum of Curiosity is like my son's favourite radio programme. So I get an email and it says, Andy, we've got a slot coming up on the Museum of Curiosity. Two things. It's happening this Sunday. So are you free on Sunday? I'm like, yes, of course, I'd love to.

And the panel is Cathy Lett and Stephen Fry. Are you OK with that? And I'm like I went, yes, of course, I'd love to. And the panel is Cathy Lett and Stephen Fry. Are you okay with that? And I went, oh yes, ha ha ha. And then spent a whole week fretting about it. Cathy Lett's amazing, because when I was a journalist, like a junior reporter on the Sunday Telegraph, we always used to get those last minute

stories on a Saturday where some ridiculous survey would have been done by the University of Ohio. And I remember one of them was like, whether optimists made better lovers than pessimists. The one person he could always rely on to give an amazing last minute quote, which

enveloped itself in puns was Kathy Nett. She was amazing. She was so good, and of course Stephen Fry was so good. It was so much fun to do. They record for about two hours. It's live audience. It's live audience. Yeah, it's the radio theatre.

It's great fun. And the audience don't know who they're going to get. So they're all, they queue. If I'd known, I'd have come and heckled. I'd have just said. Get off me, love. John Lloyd introduced, he goes, very, very pleased to be introduced.

Andy Miller. People go, you know mild he goes kathy let whoa kathy leo steven fry the president uproar as you can imagine you know you're not you're not allowed to say what you put in are you i'm not allowed to say what i put in but what i put in is is i was really does it have a book related it does have a book related theme but but also it was just it's one of those things where when you somebody you meet somebody like Stephen Fry is famous as Stephen Fry is right and what you realize is as he's sitting there both chatting to you backstage and then chatting in front of an audience he he's not off he's never off no because that's Stephen Fry no

he literally just I mean Stephen literally is never off also I kind of felt when I was talking about my you know about my various things that I was talking about which are things that I've you know researched over a number of years and it could be considered my specialist subject Stephen Fry's ability to just yeah augment what I was saying effortlessly with further expertise with no notice whatsoever was really pretty um pretty impressive so uh yeah so that was great hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books you join us in the rightly decorated full embed set of our sponsors unbound the website which brings authors and readers together to create beautiful books.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, I am the author of The Day of the Jackal. And joining us today is author and journalist Elizabeth Day. Hello Elizabeth. Hello. Formerly a staff feature writer for The Observer, Elizabeth's fourth novel, The Party, is published in July by the excellent publisher Fourth Estate. Yes.

How exciting. I mean, as equally good as Unbound, one might say. Yeah, they've been amazing. They've been amazing. And they've got an incredible cover, and I'm really excited about it. It's in real time a dinner party, isn't it? It's real time at a party, which incorporates canapes,

which one might describe as dinner. OK, so it's not a dinner party. It is, yes. It takes place over the course of one evening. Quite germane to the book that we're here to talk about today, which is Rosamund Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets. But first, Andy, what have you been reading? This podcast will be going up on the... It's probably, if you're listening to this, the day of issue.

It is Monday 17th April 2017. Just a few days ahead of this year's Record Store Day on Saturday April 22nd. Record Store Day, as some of you will know, though not all of you, is a day where record shops... I don't know why they call it Record Store Day. Record shops are full of... It's an American affectation, I think.

It came from America. Ghastly. Like mac and cheese. So Record Shop Day is on Saturday, and record companies release special limited edition vinyl pressings of things and people sleep out overnight on pavements to get that limited shape 12 inch

picture disc of Toto's Africa or whatever it is that they've decided they want and this year for Records to a Day the enterprising publisher Bloomsbury is bringing out the new novel by the brilliant Magnus Mills it's entitled the forensic records society I think he's one of the best comic writers working in Britain

today he's also found this strand of humor in what I would describe as sort of frustrated bureaucratic cross-talk with groups of men sitting around not quite understanding what the others are getting at and with all sorts of schemes, the scheme for full employment or the restraints of beasts is about building fences if I remember rightly anyway this novel

Jonathan Coe I hate the word quirky quirkier right, it's very stylised the way Magnus Mills writes. Is it like funny Kafka? It is like funny Kafka. It is like funny... Are you listening, Bloomsbury?

You can have that. It was a good day. Funny Kafka. I'd read a blurb any time. So anyway, so this new novel is coming out for Record Store Day. It's been printed to look like a seven-inch single. The hardback comes in a dust jacket with a die-cut to look like a seven inch single the hard back comes in a a dust jacket with a die-cut sleeve like a paper record sleeve and it's about a society called

the forensic record society which is a group of about half a dozen men who meet in the back room of a pub in order to listen to records properly right three three at a time with solemn respect and without recourse to personal interpretation amongst the group's founding members it's an article of faith that theirs is the only correct way to listen to records and as the society grows

in popularity splits and schisms occur in the society leading to the foundation of rival organisations such as the Confessional Records Society splits and schisms occur in the society, leading to the foundation of rival organisations such as the Confessional Records Society, the Perceptive Records Society, and in time, inevitably... Splitters.

Yeah, the New Forensic Records Society, right? So there's often a question around Magnus Wills' novels about whether he's writing allegorically or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no question around this one. This is clearly a book about faith and dogma and what have you. Now, to give you a flavour of it,

what I want to do is I just want to read the very beginning of the book and then subject it to a close reading. You'll see why in a minute, OK? This is how this book starts. Here we go. Chapter one. I saw you.

We listened closely. The voice sounded slightly remote, as if it came from an adjoining room. It was followed by a fuzzy silence. James gazed at the turntable as it ground to a halt. That's Keith, he said. You certain, I asked. Yes.

Not Roger. Yes. Not Roger. No. He played the record through for the third time. This was the agreed number of plays. So he then removed it from the turntable and returned it to his sleeve. As he did so, he gave the label a cursory glance. Fabulous music, he remarked. Now, I am going to just give you five interesting points about

that the thing that i've just read close reading right five interesting points okay so the first thing is john elizabeth matt do you know which record they were talking about in that extract that ends i saw you and has band members called Keith and Roger. So it's The Who? Yeah. It is The Who, correct. Is it... Can you narrow it down? When you say it's a record, is it a 12-minute album? A 60s single.

I so wish I could come in here with the right answer. It would be so impressive. Is it I Can See For Miles? It isn't. It's Happy Jack by The Who. So the first thing to say is Magnus Mills never mentions that. So that is, so he's tapping into it. He's already. He's already got me, right?

I'm going, oh, that's Happy Jack by The Who, right? Oh, which record? Oh, okay. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is, James's remark, Fabulous Music, that is a really obscure joke because Fabulous Music is the name

of The Who's publishing company. And is written on the label of Happy Jack because I had a look so that's the second thing, the third thing is the Forensic Records Society is in part a novel about dogmatic belief

and how it can lead one astray and that's foreshadowed in that tiny exchange with these two people arguing about, is it Keith Moon or is it Roger Daltrey, saying, I saw you at the end of Happy Jack. Point four, the person who says, I saw you at the end of Happy Jack,

is neither Keith Moon nor Roger Daltrey. It's Pete Townsend, right? Which leads me to point five. I have no doubt that the author, Magnus Mills, is well aware of all that. And that me, by pointing it out to you, have fallen into the trap that he set me. Because this is a book about how men,

and a few women, just can't see the wood for the trees when it comes to certain subjects. And that's kind of a recurring theme. Obsessive. Just can't see the wood for the trees when it comes to certain subjects. And that's kind of a recurring theme in all his books. It's such a funny book. If you're going to Record Store Day on Saturday, hold a bit of money back and buy this as well. John, what have you been reading?

Couldn't be further away. I've been reading Clover Stroud's memoir, The Wild Other. Clover I've known reading Clover Stroud's memoir, The Wild Other. Clover, I've known for some years. She worked briefly in the bookshop that we had, in the QI bookshop in the QI Club in Oxford. And the thing that everybody knows about Clover is that when she was a teenager, her mother was in a terrible riding accident

which left her completely paralysed and in a coma for 22 years. And Clover was the youngest child of, I think, five. Two families jammed together. So the book is an exploration of that, but it's much more than that as well. It's her life story. I think it would be fair to say that the grief that Clover felt at losing her mother in this very kind of painful way losing and not losing

I mean the wild in the title refers to the wildness of what happened to her she went to Ireland where she traveled with gypsies she went worked on ranches in Texas as a road we became a rodeo rider got got her spurs doing that she falls in love with a anssetian gymnast, a rider. Her sister Nell runs Gifford Circus, and she runs away with him to Ossetia, where pretty terrifying groups of gangsters with guns. So it's a memoir of how she kind of processes, without giving too much away, her mother eventually does die, and it's how she then makes sense of all these experiences and becomes a mother she's got five kids and the book ends

rather brilliantly i liked it because it's i'm interested in otherness that idea of this other which she writes about i think quite brilliantly in the book i think you've read it as well as i have read it now i totally agree with you I think it's a brilliant title because the wild other is within Clover herself but it's also the horses that she rides. It's the embracing of the darkness that they represent. I think that embracing of the darkness is interesting. There's a connection that

will come on to Rosamund Loman I think. It's not too tenuous but the idea, the Jungian other the shadow, the thing that you are always trying to escape, it's in the end only by embracing it that you can come to any, I mean, she's battled with depression, she's battled with all kinds of difficulties, but it's, I think it's beautifully written. Yeah, I did read one, just to get a bit of flavour thing, just from the, towards the end

of the book, just after her mother has finally died, so she's kind of lost her mother twice. In the decades between mum's accident and her death, I thought I'd known grief since I was constantly mourning the loss of the person and all the life she had been. But after she died, I realised more clearly that though I had glimpsed grief, it had never really been present in my life. I'd just mistaken it for trauma, which is very different. Trauma is electric and dynamic intensely painful

but sometimes strangely exciting too trauma had whipped me awake in the night to shout words i couldn't hear as i was shaken out of sleep from another dream about finding my mother then losing her again or being violently dispossessed from a childhood home i didn't recognize um it's really it's it's beautifully done and and you come out of the book with a massive kind of respect for her and also for her husband who's had to put up with a fair amount of repair to say the slightly tangent i mean the slight link with rosamund layman was that rosamund layman's life in a way that when clover i saw clover talking about the book and she said i can't believe i'm still talking about my mother's accident 25 years Rosamund Lehman lost her daughter Sally at age 24 and you get the same sense that sometimes

things happen in people's lives that are so deeply traumatic that they can't you know that it takes it takes them almost I mean in Rosamund Lehman's's case, we might talk about it a bit later on. Well, her daughter died in the late 1950s and Rosamund Lehmann died in 1990. And it's perfectly reasonable to say that Rosamund Lehmann spends the final third of her life trying to understand that event and perhaps succeeds or fails, depending on your point of view but well we'll come on to it we'll come on to it the book chat will continue on the other side of this

message elizabeth weather in the streets yes by rosamund layman when did you first uh encounter this uh book or encounter rosamund layman i first encountered rosamund layman when i was um Rosamund Lehman? I first encountered Rosamund Lehman when I was snaffling through a secondhand bookshop, as is my wont, and I'd heard her name but I'd never read her books and I came across Invitation to the Waltz and I picked it up and I read it and I loved it and Invitation to the Waltz I discovered to my delight after having finished it was the first in one of two books, the second of which is The Weather in the Stre and it features the same protagonist Olivia Curtis who in invitation to the waltz is depicted as a 16 17 year old on the threshold of maturity who meets this dashing young man Rollo Spencer at a ball but the weather in the streets I then came to a couple of years later

again I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop and it was one of those beautiful old Virago editions and I liked it even more than Invitation to the Waltz because it seems to me that the weather in the streets deals with serious issues of what it is to be a single woman and a single woman in a society so it was published in 1936 so a single woman in a society that was going through a period of transition where the class boundaries were still very much in evidence but were starting just about to blur and Olivia Curtis is a woman who belongs to a sort of middle class society and she stands betwixt and between the aristocracy and the sort of bohemian crowd that she rolls with in London and in The Weather in

the Streets Olivia Curtis is now sort of 10 years on and she has got married but she's separated from her husband and not divorced and she meets Rollo Spencer once again on a train on a visit back to her parents because her father's got pneumonia and is ill and that starts an affair and I when I read it the first time I'd never read anything which so accurately portrayed that feeling of guilt and yet guilt coexisting with this sort of immense happiness of falling properly in love and I just find it amazing and it's been a really wonderful exercise rereading it for this podcast because I first read it in my early 30s. I'm now in my mid to late 30s. And, you know, in that time I've actually, you know,

I've been through a marriage and I got divorced and sorry if this is TMI, but I've had, I had a miscarriage and Weather in the Streets is most famous for its abortion scene, which was revolutionary for the time. But just rereading it now, it is so damn good. And it's so modern. And the way she writes is also unique. She writes from the first person and the third person,

sometimes within the space of a single page. And I hadn't noticed that the first time. I was so sort of engrossed in the characterisation. And it was just amazing. Do you think you noticed that the first time. I was so sort of engrossed in the characterisation, and it was just amazing. Do you think you noticed that because you're writing fiction? Were you... Had you written... I'd written my first novel. Right. And my second novel I wrote contemporaneously

with having read The Weather In The Streets. And it's fascinating coming back to it, because I've now written two more novels, and I had not realised how psychically this book had affected me because there's a scene in my new novel, The Party, out on 13th July. Excellent. There's a scene in the new novel. Published by Forth Estate, haven't we?

The new novel is all about actually a male observer who's desperate to belong to a more glamorous aristocratic crowd and there's one specific scene that I'm thinking of where this protagonist's wife has a showdown with a mother figure who is an aristocrat, who's Lady Fitzmaurice. Like Lady Spencer. Like Lady Spencer in The Women in the Streets.

And it's so... I mean, Rosamund Lehmann does it brilliantly, and I hope that I've achieved half of that, but I had no idea that that had stayed with me all that time. Can I ask... I'm going to ask first John and then John's going to ask me, John when did you first, can you remember when you first heard the name Rosamund Lane?

Bookseller, Virago, she's just one of those she was one of the big I didn't read her but I was aware of her being the kind of it was sort of the emblematic Virago writer as you say, encountered in second

hand bookshops but had somehow fallen out of print, interesting why that happened and then was sort of I think they were republished in the was it the late 70s, early 80s? They were republished in the early 80s, we should talk a bit about this later on but they were instrumental in

establishing Virago, they sold about 20,000 copies per book. The Rosamund Lehmann books? Yeah. I didn't know that. They were a big publishing success when they reappeared. One of the founders of Virago became a great friend of Rosamund Lehmann's and indeed there's the introduction,

despite the slightly, I think, misleading comparison of Rosamund Lehman. To be honest, I don't think Carmen meant it to be compared in any way to Bridget Jones' diary. I think what she was saying was at the time when she was growing up, these books were passed around as kind of second-hand used paperbacks, women who were growing up in the 40s, 50s, 60s, because they were so brilliant and so unlike anything else. And they were, I guess, they kind of had a cult

status. But that was the first time I was aware of her. And also, I've had relationships with women, almost all of whom have read and recommended Rosamund Lehmann to me. And now, finally, I've come around to it. I'm going to pitch my tent here here that I

I like you John remember as a bookseller Rosamund Lehman's books being on the shelf and sort of being in the background and I remember the penguin 20th century classic of Dusty Answer but I hadn't read anything by her until the start of this year. I read Invitation to the Waltz. And I read it, as long-time listeners to Backlisted will know, because of my never-ending, burgeoning enthusiasm for Anita Bruckner. This is the time check for how long we're into the podcast. Bruckner's up.

And here indeed, on the front cover of Weather in the Streets, is a quote from Anita Bruckner. Rosamund Lehman was Anita Bruckner's favourite author. So I read Invitation to the Waltz, which I loved. And actually, I think Invitation to the Waltz, I'm speaking in April, is the best book that I've read this year so far. I mean, I really like Weather in the Streets.

I really like Weather in the Streets, but I loved Invitation to the Waltz. so i've read invitation to the waltz then i read the weather in the streets elizabeth when you we knew you were going to come on and talk about it and then i read in in quick order i then read dusty answer because i asked people on twitter i got a massive response on twitter i said which i've read these two which should i read next and the two books that people said loud and clear were Dusty Answer, which most people said, and The Ballad and the Source, which a handful of people said.

So I've read four of her books in the space of about three months. And what I'm here to report back from that experience is that I really find the way that she writes constantly fascinating even if some stuff I don't think always works all the time but also those four novels I can't remember

reading a writer and we talk about J.L. Carr well the very first episode of Battlestar we did was about J.L. Carr where all of J.L. Carr's books are different from one another. With Lehman, each of those four novels is really pretty different from one another in terms of actual style, the style in which they're in. And yet, you could pick them up, open them up anywhere, and probably know you were reading a novel by Rosamund Lehman.

She's got this very interesting way of looking at the world, even if the way in which it's expressed changes from book to book. One of the things I really liked about Weather in the Streets, and I haven't read, I would definitely read more, I went the other way, I read her memoir, which is The Swan in the Evening.

A photo of her is, sorry, you can't look at this, listeners, but that photo, she looks like a cross between Betty Davis and Marilyn Monroe in that photo it's bizarre it's called Fragments of an Inner Life I really really loved it I have to say I mean it's not without the death of her daughter definitely affected her very very deeply but it's a really intelligent

The Swan in the Evening is published in the late 60s where she hasn't written or published anything for 10 years. And she did in fact, she only wrote one more novel after that which I haven't read. Which is where she attempts to

incorporate a lot of her... She stopped writing after her daughter died. Which was as you say, 58 I think. And then this was written in 67. And Sea Grape Tree, which is the one novel you're talking about think yeah and then this was written in 67 and sea grape tree which is the one novel you're talking about is 76 and was universally panned wasn't it i mean it was a but i think there's well not kind of so do you think we could have a representative uh

no pressure no pressure could we could we hear a bit on we're on the streets? Well, shall we have a bit first? Let's have a bit first. OK, well, the bit I've chosen to read is where she's talking... Rosamund Lehman's talking about the nature of time and how it warps when you realise you've fallen in love with someone. It's the beginning of section two. It's the beginning of section two.

So Rollo has just declared himself and said that he's interested in seeing Olivia. The other thing that I want to say about this book, just quickly, is that it's two people being nice to each other, and I know that they are flawed characters, and Rollo definitely is a flawed character and behaves in certain ways or doesn't behave in certain ways, but ultimately there's love there and affection there,

and I just rather like that. It's a really good point. Okay, so here's Rosamund Lehmann on time it was then the time began when there wasn't any time the journey was in the dark going on without end or beginning without landmarks

bearings lost asleep waking time whirled throwing up in paradoxical slow motion a sign a scene sharp startling lingering as a blow over the heart a look flared urgently meaning something stamping itself forever ever ever gone flashed away a face and a train passing not ever to be recovered a voice called out saying words going on on on eternally reverberating, fading out.

A voice of tin, a hollow voice, the plain meaning lost, the echo meaningless. A voice calling out by night in a foreign station where the night train draws through, not stopping. There was this inward double living under amorphous impacts of dark and light mixed. That was when we were together. Not being together was a vacuum. It was an unborn place in the shadow of the time before and the time to come. It was remembering and looking forward, drawn out painfully both ways, taut like a bit of elastic, wearing.

There were no questions in this time. All was agreeing, answer after answer, melting, lapsing into one another. Yes, yes, darling, yes. Smiling, accepting, kissing, dismissing. No argument, no discussion. No separate character anymore to judge, test, learn by degrees. He was like breathing, like the heart beating,

unknown, essential, mysterious. He was like the dark. That's great. It's so good. And you know, that's real. That's real writing. Do you know what I mean? Because it conveys so much,

as well as being just sort of lyrical and sort of incredibly structured, it conveys so much, and she's also amazing at dialogue, and it's very rare to read a writer who can do both, the lyricism and the dialogue. She does the interior thing, and technically what I found so, I mean, really revelatory,

is I think she's doing what Wolf, even Joyce are trying to do with the representation of consciousness. I think she does it in a way that actually, as you're reading it, kind of works better. The way she moves, as you said before, moves from first to third person, so that you're in a character's

head and then you're out again, and then you're looking at the characters and then you're in again. And that sense of inside-outside, funny, i just had a little bit that was a bit it's a bit further on than that but i just if you wanted to pinpoint the peculiar kind of nether world of when you're having an affair with someone this i just thought this was this this captures it and i think it's also kind of where the title comes from. Beyond the glass casing I was in was the weather, where the winter streets in rain, wind, fog, in the fine frosty days and nights,

the mild, damp grey ones. Pictures of London winter, the other side of the glass, not reaching the body, no wet ankles, muddy stockings, blown hair, cold, aching cheeks, fog-smarting eyes, throat, nose. Not my usual bus-taking London winter. It was always indoors, or in taxis, or in his warm car. It was mostly in the safe dark, or in the half-light in the deepest corner of the restaurant,

as out of sight as possible. Drawn curtains, shaded lamp, or only the fire. In this time there was no sequence, no development. Each time was new, was different, existing without relation to before and after. All the times were one and the same. It's just really phenomenal. Oh, that's so good.

And it is that sense of being in a bubble contained from the rest of the world. And the weather in the streets is so interesting because often Rollo is shown as someone who protects her from the outside world, and he's always ushering her into taxis, as that passage says. And it does have to be furtive and indoors, and this gradual, encroaching sense of suffocation.

It's beautiful. I'm just going to read the blurb on the back of my, I think, early 90s virago edition pass me pass me i've got a horrible edition see what we've got here they're both quite short let's do let's do both of them okay so this is this is the early 90s virago edition this is a love story of a sort taking sorry i'm sorry what okay let's come back to that carry on this is a love story of a sort. Taking... Sorry, I'm sorry, what? OK, let's come back to that, carry on. This is a love story of a sort.

Taking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, it tells the story of Olivia Curtis, ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder and apparently little wiser. Sorry, am I amusing you? A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to an adulterous, forbidden love affair. And a new world of secret meetings, brief phone calls and snatched liaison in anonymous hotel rooms.

Years ahead of its time when first published, this subtle and powerful novel shocked even layman fans with its searing honesty and passionate portrayal of clandestine love. I mean, it's like they're playing chick lit bingo. It's like forbidden love affair, tick. Hermione Lee said doomed chick lit was one way of looking at it. I've got so much to say on this, but do you want to read the other one? No, no.

Well, look, I know I'm not going to read the other blurb. Because it's almost exactly the same. Because the other blurb is a condensation of that blurb. You can see. I think Rosamund Lehman has suffered greatly from being called a romance novelist, a sort of middle-briar romance novelist. Now, you used the M word there that is really interesting so i was reading there's some really good stuff come on to rosamund layman's biography in a minute but i was cross-referencing it there was a mention in

selena hastings's biography excellent biography of rosamund layman of rosamund layman's friendship very prickly friendship, with Stevie Smith. Stevie Smith is an author that we did on Backlisted last year, so I went and found Francis Spaulding's biography of Stevie Smith and cross-referenced it with that. And Francis Spaulding, in that biography, refers to Rosamund Lehman as... Let me see if I can find this. Solid middle brow.

And he's not joking. And this seems the moment to bring this in. There's an essay by Jonathan Coe about Virago in the 80s. And he sort of addresses this here. He says, Lehmann was not one of the novelists I discovered on my first ventures into the Virago list,

but once I'd been introduced to her a few years later, it was the start of a literary love affair which has lasted now for more than two decades. The Ballad and the Source, though it's probably my favourite amongst her novels, is not typical. Even some of Lehmann's admirers find it embarrassing. It's a story of the relationship between a mother, her daughter and her granddaughters, in which betrayal, manipulation and emotional histrionics are shown to have a cumulatively destructive effect across the generations. It is indeed

melodramatic, although as someone who has always seen life itself as being full of melodrama, I simply find that this adds to the realism. When I first read it, I bought copies for many of my friends, confident that they would thank me for introducing them to a masterpiece. Polite silence, however, seemed to be the more usual response.

It was my first intimation that layman's fiction was something of a minority taste. I'm still at a loss to say why. It seems to me that she has every quality that a great writer should possess in spades. An extraordinary gift for description, for evoking the tones and textures of the material world. An exceptionally sophisticated approach to structure, progressing from the linear narrative of her first novel,

Dusty Answer, to the complex arrangement of embedded narratives in her last major work, The Echoing Grove. And above all, an astonishing, unembarrassed emotionality, which gives a visceral power to her recurring themes, thwarted love, faithlessness, the unbearable sadness of naive romantic feelings being crushed by the passage of time. It's because of the single-mindedness with which she focuses on these themes, I suppose, that Lehmann's reputation remains problematic. In her day, she was certainly considered an important writer, and she was popular too. But still, to look back on some of the reviews she received is to be reminded that notions of what constitutes a serious writer can be heavily weighted with

assumptions, and also that the Virago Modern Classics Project was, and remains, a necessary one. That's so fascinating there, because I do think Rosamund Lehmann suffered from many of the things that I would say Elizabeth Jane Howard suffered from, and Elizabeth Jane Howard is also one of my favourite novelists. They were both astonishingly beautiful. They both had complex loved lives and were often overshadowed by the reputation

of their more famous lovers, most notably Cecil Day-Lewis, who they both had affairs with, and in Elizabeth Jane Howard's case, Kingsley Amis, they both talk, they both write about family settings, but in that microcosm, they talk about deeply important things that affect us all in the way that we are humans.

And it's a matter of such irritation to me that for decades, and it's getting a bit better now but female novelists if they wrote about a family were dismissed as sort of domestic dramatists whereas if Jonathan Franzen does it or indeed Tolstoy that's like Anna Karenina which is all about a family that's a great state of the nation novel and and there's such a disparity between the two and and as much as I appreciate that Jonathan Coe essay, the word emotionality I think is still sort of troubling. I would say instead of emotionality, Lehmann has this sort of acute empathy and that for me is what novels should

be about, character and empathy and understanding. I must say, I agree with you Elizabeth, but I must say I found the, and I hate saying this, so sorry listeners and sorry everyone. I struggled with Dusty Answer in a way that I did not struggle with Invitation to the Waltz or The Weather in the Streets. I did too. Because Dusty Answer seemed to me clearly. It's your first novel, right? Well, right, exactly. So there's a kind of prodigious element to it, that it's written very young, but also it's tremendously enervated and Bloomsbury-ish.

And I found it as a, you know, greying, fat-headed, surrey male nerd. It pushed me quite hard to find my way into it. Whereas I didn't find that with Invitation to the Waltz I didn't find that with The Weather in the Streets I actually agree with you about Dusty Answer but I think as John says it is her first novel

and what I do appreciate about Rosamund Lehman is that she takes risks she's not showy about it but she does take risks in every single one of her books and she makes it, certainly in the weather and the street, she makes it look easy. And again, I think that's something she's suffered from. She makes it look easy. She's a brilliant choreographer.

The dinner party scenes, she's putting characters into situations. As you say, the dialogue, I think, is incredible. But it's really interesting what you say about the difference. Because I think in many ways, it's the's really interesting what you say about the difference because i think in many ways it's the psychological profundity in layman i think leaves you know bride said revisited behind i think this i think there's an amazing sensitivity to actually what happens within a relationship between a man and a woman and you know i i guess as a man i struggle a

little with rollo you want to give him a good slapping because she's amazing. You know, Olivia Curtis is one of the most brilliant female characters I've ever encountered in literature. And I think the way that's drawn, there are times when you think, oh, for God's sake, you know, give up on him, go and get a job. You know, you don't need Rollo in your life. But as you say, they're very kind. You could easily turn Rollo into a caricature.

I mean, you know, he's kind of, he's dashing, but he never degenerates into being a cat. He's not a bounder. He's not a bounder. No, he's not a bounder or a cat. Your sympathy never is totally lost for him. God, that, yeah, the final exchange is where she's, you know, not really having any of it and he's still trying to kind of, it's god that yeah the final exchange is where she's you know not really having any of it

and he's still trying to kind of it's it's yeah it's painful book there's also she does the great mind i'd like to just talk about my favorite scene in the book is so there's a one of the things that i think makes her such an interesting writer is like all interesting writers what she leaves out so the so this famously this novel was scandalous in its time because as you said elizabeth because it has a scene uh with an abortion in it um which the american publishers wanted to remove far more scandalous in fact we may well come on to this but voyage in the dark by gene reese which was published two years earlier another uh scandalous novel with a abortion scene in it rosamund lay Lehmann and Jean Rees were brief friends.

We might discuss the terms of their meeting, because it's pretty good. But this scene in the book, you see the run-up to the abortion, and then she leaves out the thing you might expect to read. And when you next meet her, she's on her way home and she's waiting for the miscarriage to start and she goes to a cinema.

She doesn't feel too bad. And then she comes out of the cinema and she's beginning to feel not too clever. And she bumps into her ex-husband Ivor. And this is my favourite scene in this book. I just want to read this little bit her husband from whom she's drifted apart

with whom she was never really in love they sort of seem to irritate one another more than that they hate one another they waited together on the edge of the circus then crossed towards the Criterion then across again into Piccadilly. Extraordinary, depressing, how the old relationship re-established itself at once, pat and neat, without a moment's embarrassment or uncertainty.

every balloon as fast as he blew it up. A sadistic, conscientious governess. He, resentful, aggressive, feebly jaunty, making a stand against yet wishing to collapse to receive protection. Had supper, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. All I want. Where are you making for now? Home. If you want to come along and forage in the kitchen, you can. I can't offer you much, but I think there's a tin of tomato soup and some bread and cheese, perhaps a bit of ham. Thanks, I will if you don't mind. His voice brightened. He's hungry. He stepped out more jauntily with his short, sissy-ish, sideways-veering gait, one shoulder up, one down. Well, I can't walk anymore, she said presently. Get a taxi, will you? He hailed one opposite Burlington House. Pain. The lights, the traffic swam and snapped in

her head as she waited. Pain. In the taxi, she huddled in a corner. After a bit, she burst out laughing. This is a rum start, she said. I suppose it is, he said absently. He was leaning forward to watch the clock. It's all right, I've got half a crown. Though I don't know, he said, it doesn't seem outstandingly odd to me. Rather pleasant, she didn't answer. And presently, he noticed that she seemed to have been taken ill. didn't answer and presently he noticed that she seemed to have been taken ill now the notes that are being hit there yeah notes of character the development of the plot the the description of him there you know what's that phrase that i feebly jaunty feebly so wonderful also she writes it with such a lightness of touch,

yet elucidating such profound and painful things within that. And I think just hearing you read it as well, it just brings it home to you. She's terrific. I mean, how many novelists... I know that I wouldn't do this. If I were writing a character who had just come out of an abortion and was suffering a miscarriage,

I would not have that character run in coincidentally to her estranged husband. But it's brilliant. It's actually brilliant and you believe in it, even though it's a sort of ridiculous coincidence. So we've got a clip now of Rosamund Lehman talking about how she went about writing her novels, which seems like it might be appropriate at this point. I'm not very disciplined. I've never been able to shut myself away and write regularly. I've always had so many other things to do.

When I really began a writing career in the 30s, after I married, I had children to look after and a house to run and a lot of entertaining to do, and the children always came first. And I always found it very difficult to start a book. Once I had started, I simply went on. Sometimes I wrote for a couple of hours and sometimes I wrote for five or six hours. I started at word one, line one, page one and went on until it stopped well I why I think so

interesting about that in terms of what you were saying Elizabeth is those artistic decisions seem that that seem like they were often made instinctively rather than as the result of you know in-depth planning yes that where where will i find the next interesting thing which will yield a moment of revelation of the character or in a moment of emotional revelation never where the and the beats are never quite where you think they're going to be i mean she she gets annoyed in lots of the interviews that as all novelists do by the you know the the lazy questions about is it questions about how autobiographical is it although she does say about Olivia Curtis

that there's quite a lot of her in Olivia Curtis and you do get that sense that like all I think great novelists we should also say that these three books Dusty Answer was a massive bestseller.

And the next two... A Note in Music. There was a one in between, wasn't there? A Note in Music and then Invitation to the Waltz and then Weather in the Streets. I think in something like 1936, she was described by the New Yorker as the greatest living novelist. So she had a fantastic early reputation,

which is all the more remarkable that she only really wrote seven novels because she lived it It's also worth saying because we're backlisted and we like the publishing insider story that she moved from Chateau had been her publisher for her first three novels

and after Invitation to the Waltz, she moved for the big bucks to HarperCollins, or Collins as it was then. And there's a description in the biography of... Yes, some things don't change. She was offered an advance of £750 for The Weather in the Streets, over twice the amount, £300. Chateau had paid for Invitation to the Waltz twice the amount 300 pounds chato had paid for

invitations to the waltz harper collins then launched a very if they there'll be nobody from harper collins listing a very collins-ish what's described as a showy campaign of posters and that and was a huge bestseller weather in the streets was a huge bestseller so So this idea of layman, she can't quite win. You know, she is hanging out with Strakey and Virginia Wolfe and all these famous literary writers but she's also

selling large quantities of books. In France particularly, Dusty Answer, the title of which escapes me in French, is still a very famous very well, they loved her in France particularly. She was a bestseller. I think the other thing that she does brilliantly, which often gets overlooked because the weather in the streets

is a story of an affair between a man and a woman, but she does relationships between women terrifically well. There's a relationship between Olivia and her older sister Kate. Oh, it's wonderful, yeah. Which is so brilliantly painted in a very understated way. But the book opens with Olivia being called by her mother, telling her that her father's ill with pneumonia. And Olivia finds out that Kate, her older sister,

already knows and has been there some days. And so much is told in that little detail that Kate is more responsible and seen as the more family-oriented one, and indeed she's the one who's produced the grandchildren. And there's a great deal of love and affection between the two sisters, but Olivia can't help but feel she's somehow the black sheep and has somehow sort of failed convention in comparison.

And I think it's not often that relationships between sisters are that well portrayed in literature, I don't think. I think it's a tricky subject. I felt I'd really benefited from reading With the Weather in the Street so hard on the heels of Invitation to the Waltz. And I know you probably don't need to have read Invitation to the Waltz,

but I found it, partly because of the thing you were talking about, Elizabeth, partly of tracing how the relationship between the sisters, it's so brilliantly sketched in Invitation to the Waltz and then it's picked up again in relation

to very specific events that you've been told about little moments of exchange between the sisters which are then picked up ten years later I love the scene where they're, you know, just, again, just her ability to catch the kind of ebb and flow of being at a party

where you're a middle-class person at an upper-class party. Yes, it's very Jane Austen, I feel. Exactly, and there are moments when she thinks she's lost with the dialogue with Marigold, and then it comes back again, and she feels she's back in them. I don't think I've read anywhere a better account of that kind of uncomfortable. John, I just feel we should give people

the bits and pieces of the biography. Oh, yes, we should. It's so splendid. So Rosamund Lehmann is born in Buckinghamshire in 1901. She is the second of four children. One sister was Beatrix Lehmann, the actress. Her brother was the writer John Lehmann. He was also the editor of New Writing.

The Lehmanns were a sort of literary family who attracted both praise and a degree of contempt. Stephen Spender said of them, the Lehmanns think they're the Bronte sisters when in fact they're the Marx brothers. So they were educated at home and then she was a scholar at Girton College, Cambridge. She wrote her first novel, Dusty Answer,

when she was in her mid-twenties. By 1928 she'd already been married twice. She had one son and one daughter. Then a note in music, Invitation to the Waltz is 1932, The Weather in the Streets is 1936. As we discussed, her daughter dies very suddenly in the late 50s and she develops an interest in spiritualism, which carries her through really to the end of her life.

She writes about it in the book you were talking about, John. This one in the evening. Just quickly, I think about it in the book you were talking about, which is The Swan in the Evening. Just quickly, I think she gets a bad press for that as well, because there's a great deal of condescension about the fact that she sought comfort in that, but then so did Conan Doyle when his... Absolutely. And he never faced the same sort of criticism.

But also, it's a brilliant short book, The Swan in the Evening. I'm really, really pleased I read it, because it's... She's not an idiot i mean she writes beautifully about about her her actual physical i mean the spiritual experiences the mystical experiences that she has she evolves a sense that there is something beyond life uh and that life persists but she's not gullible i mean it's it's it's it's wonderful right and you know and? And she's a huge kind of devotee of Jung. She reads lots of very sensible psychological...

We should also say, I think, you know, she is mixing with... If I just read you this list of names of the people who pop up in Selina Hastings's biography, Virginia Woolf, Guy Burgess, Rex Warner, Stephen Tennant, Denton Welch, Elizabeth Bowen, Laurie Lee, Lawrence van der Post, Noel Coward, Ian Fleming, Stevie Smith, Jean Rees, et cetera, et cetera. But, and here's the thing, the intellectuals' distaste for spiritualism

is a way of keeping this best-selling author as quote-unquote solid middle brow. That's what Rosamund Lehmann thought, that's what I think. You know, there is a way of saying, well, she can't have it all, she can't have literary credibility and be a bestseller and be so beautiful, which she was famously beautiful. And what we should also say about Rosamund Lehmann is that she was the international vice-president of International Pen. Yeah, yeah.

And she's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She's a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. She's a... She's not a lightweight. The idea that she was in some way scatty and female... You know, exactly what you were saying, Elizabeth, the idea of her as... A writer of romance.

A writer of romance and a person of some lightness get carried away by her waters like that kind of sense and i think the other thing is that that she was crushed as anyone would be by the death of her daughter sally and sally was 24 and it was an infectious disease while she was on holiday in indonesia so it was completely out of the blue and after that and i know the selena hastings biography talks about this she became uh she had a slight what one might interpret as a slightly more bitter attitude towards the world and i think a lot of people again dismissed her as sort of shrewish and um slightly unpleasant to be around and and and it's just so unfair yeah it was so unfair really i mean i think that you get that like I say the writing in

The Swan in the Evening is really really beautiful I feel I like this feeling you have of injustice I think you're absolutely right and I have to say much as I love and admire

Virago I think that the contemporary, the newer jackets are not helping. I mean, they're definitely... But they're in print. They're available. They were out of print for many years. They've been in print since the 80s. Virago kept them in print, which is commendable.

That's brilliant. We were talking a bit earlier about the circles in which she moved, Rosamund Loman moved she has a long very serious affair with the to be poet laureate which ends very badly

he leaves her for his mic she also gets into a few literary feuds and squabbles one of which is with Stevie Smith, with whom she had a very prickly relationship. They tended to write rather unkind reviews of one another's books.

But I must... This is a quote from Stevie Smith, who'd had a sort of, you know, a spat on an exchange of letters with Rosamund Lehman, and then she wrote to somebody else and said, I've been getting rather involved lately with the literary boys and girls. You know how bunchy they are.

Phew! Words fly round and lose nothing in the telling. I now have to keep on asking people out to dinner to explain I didn't say what I was reported to say and so on. This is very tedious and expensive. Please, I shouldn't. The unintentional, the one story I like which from the biography I love was the She had a brief affair with Ian Fleming

where Ian Fleming rather caddishly double booked her and his wife so they arrived at the house at the same time and the wife was foul to her but to cheer her up he gets a live squid and carries it into the bedroom but rosamund is not amused why does he get the live squid from they're in the gold knight gold knight right but there's not a lot of laughs in the last in the last third of her life to be fair she loses you know her books stop selling go out print, and she loses her looks as well. And yet, at the same time, she has this revival via Virago.

She opens the Virago bookshop in Covent Garden. Do you remember that? I barely remember. I can remember it, but it's like 1984 or something. Incredible. Or 85. Yeah, I was just going to read, just as another... This is comedy, right?

This is what she does which I think is social comedy and observation and there's a lot of I don't think the nuances of class have been better written about in the 20th century so this is the women doing knitting

and needlework I can't bear having idle hands Mary confessed gently I got the children's winter jumpers finished and stockings for John so I thought to myself well why shouldn't I give myself and needlework. I can't bear having idle hands, Mary confessed gently. I got the children's winter jumpers finished and stockings for John, so I thought to myself, well, why shouldn't I give myself a treat and do something in the ornamental line for a change?

What's it going to be, dear? Oh, it's just for a chair. I'm doing a set of eight for the dining room. What a labour for you. She uses italics brilliantly through the book as well. What a labour for you. Well, I think it will be gay, she said meekly, holding up the square with her dear little

old-fashioned head on the side. And there's the killer. Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay. And do your children know yet they hate you? That's the internal monologue. That just kind of comes out of nowhere. And it's so modern.

It's so modern. Well, the thing is, I kept having to go back and check, when was this written? 1936. I know, and you think, my God, it's extraordinary. So in 1957, Rosamund undertakes a therapeutic course of LSD. Yeah, because she was a friend. She was a chum of Huxley's as well.

She was a chum of everyone. And's as well. She was a chum of everyone. And then she wrote her description of her acid trip. And I would be neglecting my juicy if I didn't read out her description of taking LSD. A hard-edged, semi-mineral, disparate world of artefacts and coldness. Phenomena that astonished me and yet had no meaning and from which I was horribly separated

so that I could feel no love for or pleasure in them and the visual hallucinations I had for a time were of reptilian or crustacean forms of life i.e. PTR's hands became crawling lobsters his face and also the psychiatrist's looked knowing in italics crafty eyed although archaic images of stone His face and also the psychiatrist's looked knowing in italics. Crafty-eyed, although archaic images of stone.

That's like the classiest description of an acid trip ever, isn't it? It's amazing. So usually Olivia and Rollo have their assignations in Olivia's flat or hotel rooms. But this is the first time, for various reasons, that she has had to go to his marital home. We went up to the next floor, the stair carpets chestnutty brown and the paint deep, tawny yellow. Nice. And opened a door and switched some lights on.

It's a lovely room of its kind. It really is, I exclaimed. And he said, yes, it's nice, isn't it? We knocked two rooms into one to make it. That we was rather painful. I saw them planning it, doing it together, to be a background for Nicola, pleased with it together, showing it off to their friends,

never thinking I'd come and look at it. I told myself rooms made by a couple, joint possessions don't matter, they're not a real tie, not important, but they are. They're powerful. The light came indirectly from three long, shallow-scooped niches in the walls,

and these had tall white glazed pots in them, elaborate Italian shapes filled with artificial flowers. Brilliant, bright-coloured arrangements, formal but not stiff, seeming to have a kind of rhythm in them, elaborate Italian shapes filled with artificial flowers brilliant, bright coloured arrangements formal but not stiff, seeming to have a kind of rhythm in them I thought, if Nicola did these she can do something I think that's just so telling isn't it

well again, what you said earlier the generosity too, there are so many ways you could cheapen that scene the first time you're in the marital home of your lover. But she doesn't. It's magnificent. The we was rather painful.

The idea of them together is so crushing. Okay. Well I think sadly that's where we'll have to leave it. Thank you for choosing this book. Absolutely. And also for reading from it really beautifully. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight.

I'm certainly going to be reading more Rosamund Lehmann. When life gives you Lehmanns. Oh, amazing. Have you been sitting on that all the entire hour? Of course. You make podcasts. I've got a list of them here. When life...

The Lehmann heads. Even I'm laughing. Okay, so we should say thank you to Elizabeth, thank you to Matt Hall, our producer, thank you also to our sponsor Unbound. You can get in touch with us on at BacklistedPod on Twitter, at Facebook, Backlisted, and on the Unbound

website, unbound.com forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. I saw you. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.