Growing Up: Invitation to the Waltz

Abstract

Invitation to the Waltz is a more assured and a more original composition than Rosamond Lehmann’s earlier novels. It is also alone among Lehmann’s fictions in being more comic than romantic in tone, its darker elements kept to the margins of the novel’s mood, always present but never allowed to dominate. It is a work that makes outstanding use of minimal materials, selecting only fragments of experience from the life of a young girl over two days. Yet through this evocation of the transient moment, it manages to convey a sense of a complete society in flux. Specifically, through its focus on an isolated fragment of adolescent experience, the novel powerfully re-creates the texture of an individual life — awkward, uneasy, waiting, poised on the edge of knowledge. In addition the book produces an impression of an England caught at a particular historical moment, at the turning-point of cultural consciousness that characterised the years following the First World War. And in the implicit connection made between the gauche adolescent and the sheltered world of which she is a product, the book consummately illustrates Lehmann’s ability to create substance out of the ephemeral moment.