Rosamond Lehmann

Early life Rosamond Lehmann was born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the second of four children of Rudolph Chambers Lehmann (1856–1929) and his American wife, Alice Mary Davis (1873–1956), from New England. Rosamond's father was a Liberal MP from 1906 to 1910, and founder of Granta magazine and editor of the Daily News. Because of this, Rosamond grew up in an affluent, well-educated, and well-known family; the American playwright Owen Davis was Rosamond's cousin, and her great-grandfather Robert Chambers founded Chambers Dictionary. Her great-uncle was the artist Rudolf Lehmann.

Lehmann's older sister Helen was born in 1899, and her two younger siblings were born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Her younger sister Beatrix (1903–1979) became an actress; her younger brother, John (1907–1987), a writer and publisher. Purportedly, Rosamond's father favoured Beatrix and her mother favoured John, leaving Rosamond feeling neglected. Because of this, supposedly, she turned to writing.

By 1911, Lehmann was being educated at home by the family's governess, Maria Jacquemin. Also in the home lived the family's eight servants.

In 1919 Lehmann won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. She graduated with second-class degrees in both English Literature (1921) and Modern and Medieval Languages (1922). There, she also met her first husband, Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford). It was an unhappy marriage: "He [Runciman] panicked when [Lehmann] became pregnant and insisted on an abortion, after which he praised her for being once again "all clean and clear inside". The two separated in 1927 and were officially divorced later that year. The family lived at Ipsden House in Oxfordshire between 1930 and 1939.

Lehmann's affair with Goronwy Rees began in 1936 and ended when she found out Rees was engaged to another woman, by reading about the engagement in the newspaper. Her 1967 book The Swan in the Evening is an autobiography that Lehmann described as her "Last Testament". In it she intimately describes the emotions she felt at Sarah's birth, and also those she felt at her daughter's abrupt death. The memoir also recounts the psychic experiences Lehmann claims to have had in relation to Sarah's death, a theme she revisits in her 1986 anthology Moments of Truth, which is a collection of letters from 'beyond the grave' purportedly dictated by Sarah. Some of these letters also appeared in an anthology of similar writings, The Awakening Letters, co-edited by Lehmann.

Nearly blind from cataracts, Lehmann died at home in Clareville Grove, London, on 12 March 1990, aged 89.

Works Dusty Answer (1927) A Note in Music (1930) Invitation to the Waltz (1932) The Weather in the Streets (1936) No More Music (1939) The Ballad and the Source (1944) Orion (as editor) (1945) The Gypsy's Baby & Other Stories (1946) The Echoing Grove (1953) The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967; non-fiction) A Sea-Grape Tree (1976) The Awakening Letters (1978; ed. with Cynthia, Lady Sandys) Moments of Truth (1986; anthology, non-fiction)

Biographies Selina Hastings, Rosamond Lehmann: A Life, 2002 Diana E Lestourgeon, Rosamond Lehmann, 1965 Marie-Jose Codaccioni, L'Oeuvre de Rosamond Lehmann: Sa contribution au roman féminin (1927–1952), 1983 Judy Simons, Rosamond Lehmann, 1992 Gillian Tindall, Rosamond Lehmann, 1985 Wiktoria Dorosz, Subjective Vision and Human Relationships in the Novels of Rosamond Lehmann, 1975 Wendy Pollard, Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: the Vagaries of Literary Reception, 2004 Françoise Bort, Marie-Françoise Cachin, Rosamond Lehmann et le métier d'écrivain, 2003 Ruth Siegel, Rosamond Lehmann: a Thirties Writer, 1990

Letters My Dear Alexias: Letters from Wellesley Tudor Pole to Rosamond Lehmann, by Rosamond Lehmann (1979)