The Torment of Loving: The Weather in the Streets

Abstract

Rosamond Lehmann’s mature fiction continues to explore a number of the subjects found in her earlier works: the emotional range and intensity of women’s responses, the power of the past and its hold over the present, the nature of social processes, the relationship between gender and identity. The tone of her later writing, however, undergoes a significant alteration as the tentativeness that characterised Dusty Answer and A Note in Music and the gentle comedy that set the pace for Invitation to the Waltz are replaced by a greater seriousness and emotional depth. Together with a more cynical edge to the satire, these qualities extend the reach of the three major novels (The Weather in the Streets, 1936; The Ballad and the Source, 1944; The Echoing Grove, 1953) that follow Invitation to the Waltz and serve to communicate a sense of the immense complexity of social and personal experience with which their characters must contend. Lehmann’s focus remains the inner lives of her heroines, often tremulous, always capable of intense feeling, but the scope of her work is enlarged as she examines the power structures that make up modern society, the tension between established authority and innovation, and the struggle for personal survival in a hostile environment.