1 - Transitions: Dusty Answer

Summary

In 1927 a photograph of Mrs Leslie Runciman appeared in the Tatler. With her slender neck emerging from a cape of leaves, diamond earrings swaying towards her single-strand pearl necklace, and with fashionably waved coiffure and carefully applied cosmetics, Lehmann gazes wistfully away from camera, every inch the soignée socialite. Her combination of personal beauty, sparkling intelligence and family position made her a magnet for press adulation, even if this was at times misplaced. Social diarists commented on her pretty features, her vivacity, her dark, wavy coiffure, her delightful clothes and her impeccable family background, much to Lehmann's chagrin. Such apparent composure, however, belied the turmoil beneath. At the time the photograph was taken Lehmann was living miserably in provincial exile in Newcastle, unsatisfied in her marriage, and engaged in a clandestine affair with Wogan Philipps. It is this disparity between immaculate surface and unruly substance that her early fiction both exposes and explores.

In the winter of 1925, energized by her new-found love for Philipps, Lehmann had begun work on a novel, an activity that also helped to stave off the tedium of life in the joyless Runciman household. After a few false starts, she wrote effortlessly, only frustrated by the obligations of wifely and social duties that encroached on her precious writing time. ‘I have reached my last chapter’, she wrote to her brother John, in August 1926, ‘& 2 or 3 days should see the whole thing finished; but the house is crammed with visitors, & what with them & my portrait I am completely overwhelmed’. Writing was the only activity that truly absorbed her attention and she felt desolate at being parted from her manuscript even for a day.

Dusty Answer, published in April 1927, juvenile, episodic and subjective, perfectly expresses the fusion of nostalgic past and anxious present that characterizes its historical moment. In its focus upon an ingénue heroine and her ‘entry into the world’, it mimics the traditional nineteenth-century novel with which its author was so familiar. But it locates this heroine in a culture of modernity that creates both unprecedented opportunity and a concomitant uncertainty. Divided into five sections, the story follows the 18-year-old Judith Earle through the critical years of her burgeoning maturity.