Abstract:In The Swan in the Evening Rosamond Lehmann confessed to her early ignorance of developments in twentieth-century literature and of the modernist experiments being undertaken by women artists of the p...In The Swan in the Evening Rosamond Lehmann confessed to her early ignorance of developments in twentieth-century literature and of the modernist experiments being undertaken by women artists of the period. 'I knew no other female writers, young or old; with the exception of May Sinclair whose novels excited me',20 she admitted, referring to the time when she started to write Dusty Answer. Yet, as she makes clear in her account of her literary development, she was deeply conscious of her own position within an inherited female tradition of fiction that reached back into the nineteenth century. Not Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield, but George Eliot, the Brontes and Mrs Gaskell were the acknowledged literary giants who gave her inspiration, 'great ancestresses, revered, loved and somehow intimately known'.21 Lehmann's novels demonstrate her debt to this tradition in ways that place her firmly within the ranks of contemporary enquiry, and we need to see her work within the context of women's writing of the period in order to understand her insistence on continuity as well as her sensitivity to change. For while alert to the advantages of formal inventiveness in art, Lehmann's work appears to reject the more sophisticated manifestations of the avant-garde.Read More
Publication Year: 1992
Publication Date: 1992-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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