It’s impossible not to fall in love with Olivia Curtis, the heroine of Rosamond Lehmann’s pair of novels, Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets, published in 1932 and 1936 respectively. Dreamy yet defiant, Olivia seems never quite able to make the decisions that would enable her to take control of her life.
In Invitation to the Waltz, we meet Olivia as an awkward adolescent, getting ready for a party at a neighbouring big house in the country. Dressing, she and her sister, Kate, form counterparts of each other: Kate, putting on a neat, hand-stitched camisole, will glide serenely at the dance, while Olivia stays in the bath so long her face turns red and feels acutely self-conscious of her vest bulging beneath her badly made dress. Once there, she hides in the cloakroom, willing the music to stop. She is an outsider, a misfit: something in her “fumbled, felt inharmonious, wanted almost to resist”.
In The Weather in the Streets, Olivia is still a muddler. Although the novel takes place ten years later, it is set, like its prequel, in the mid-1930s. (Lehmann wasn’t given to perfecting narrative timelines.) By now, Olivia is living in a flat in London, is separated from her husband and works part-time as a photographer’s assistant. What may be a liberated, urban existence is in fact a lonely and frugal one until Olivia meets Rollo Spencer — handsome, married, carrying The Times and a terrier under his arm — on a train.
Olivia’s fate is sealed. Being Rollo’s mistress suspends the usual dreary conditions of her life. No more buses or cheap cinema seats, but the secretive comfort of restaurants, taxis and small hotels. With Rollo there are “no wet ankles, muddy stockings, blown hair, cold-aching cheeks, fog-smarting eyes, throat, nose … not my usual bus-taking London winter”. For a time, love protects Olivia from the weather, from the city on “the other side of the glass”. Dimly, she’s aware that such shelter is only temporary.
The left-wing poet Stephen Spender upbraided Lehmann for writing about relationships, not politics. Her novels felt old-fashioned and off-kilter in the 1930s and she has suffered a reputation as a middlebrow, romantic writer ever since. But I can think of little as unromantic as the image of Olivia, towards the end of the novel, sitting on a bench in St James’s Park at the end of summer, pregnant, and knowing she will never see Rollo again. When she goes about getting an illegal abortion (as Lehmann had done in the late 1920s, after her first husband refused to have children), Olivia is on her own, her isolation complete.
Spender was wrong about Lehmann’s writing. In fact, her early novels are quietly radical. There may be little by way of public life in the lives of her characters, but Lehmann’s women — of which Olivia is the finest example — practise a subtler politics, a kind of passive resistance. Olivia’s indifference to world affairs, and her idleness and secrecy (she would like simply to while away the hours smoking and daydreaming in her room), constitute a series of small rebellions, and an eschewal of the kind of behaviour expected of women of her upbringing. (Kate, meanwhile, has married a doctor and lives in the country.)
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There is something endearingly foolhardy about the way Olivia behaves. Accepting her precarious position as Rollo’s lover, she makes a bid for freedom and private pleasure that can only fail. Formally, too, the novel is experimental. (More substantial than Invitation to the Waltz, The Weather in the Streets is remarkable by itself.) As Olivia embarks on her affair, the narrative shifts into non-linear, perspectival time — “the time … when there wasn’t any time” — and unfurls in a series of sensuously described remembered episodes. Across all her books, one of Lehmann’s greatest gifts is pacing.
Lehmann identified with the outsiderish women of her books. “I never felt I belonged to any group. I never felt I belonged anywhere,” she said late in her life. Not quite at home in her left-wing, intellectual set, neither could she quite carry off her bohemian life choices. She was a contradictory character, like Olivia, embarking on affairs yet struggling with the inevitable fallout.
Perhaps because of her experiences, she was adept at picking up on the vulnerabilities of women’s lives and on the hypocrisies of class and social rules. Candid about sexual experience, her novels captured the mood of the interwar years, when many young women felt caught between the opportunity for new sexual freedoms that nevertheless carried the risk of censure and ostracism. It’s no surprise that The Weather in the Streets resonated with her readers. After it was published, Lehmann received hundreds of letters from women saying: “This is my story … how did you know?”
Harriet Baker is the latest winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. She is the author of Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk
To find out more about the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year award, visit youngwriteraward.com
The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann (Little, Brown £9.99 pp384). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
