When stories mirror life-stories by Philippa Linton

It was a different world in 1927 ...

One of my favourite books is Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer.  Published in 1927, it was Lehmann’s first novel and she got glowing reviews for it.  The story in some ways prefigures Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: both novels are coming-of-age sagas, with the central protagonist falling under the spell of a fascinating family, with life-long consequences. 

Judith Earle is the heroine of Dusty Answer: an intelligent, solitary child, she grows up in the shadow of her glamorous neighbours, the five Fyfe cousins.  As they all grow up, their childhood friendships transform into various complex romantic entanglements.  Tragedy hits when one of the Fyfe boys is killed while he is on active service in the First World War.  Judith, now nineteen and studying at Cambridge University, falls deeply in love with one of the surviving cousins, but this love affair turns out to be a disaster. This emotional catastrophe, in addition to her intense relationship with her friend Jennifer in Cambridge, will affect Judith profoundly, turning her dreams to ashes, her youthful idealism and passion into disillusionment.  It’s up to the reader, however, to decide how deeply damaged Judith is and how her losses will shape her for the rest of her life.  I find the novel ambiguous and bittersweet rather than hopeless and despairing.

The book caused some scandal on publication because of its frank depiction of sexuality.  Frank, that is, for 1927: there are no sex scenes in it.  The author strongly implies that Judith sleeps with the young man she is so desperately in love with, but this is no more than a dreamlike hint in the text.  There are also subtle homoerotic undertones in other parts of the book but, again, nothing gratuitous or explicit.  It was a different world in 1927, and what looks mild and inoffensive to us now would have been more controversial then.

I love the book for its beautiful writing and melancholy, memorable atmosphere. I also resonate strongly with Judith as a character.  There is a remarkable passage half way through the book, the pivotal scene where Judith is dumped by her lover.  I find the passage remarkable for personal reasons: this scene had a considerable impact on me when I first read it in 1983.  I could have been reading about myself, so closely did this scene resemble an episode from my own life.  The painful scene that plays out between Judith and her ex-boyfriend mirrored, to a quite uncanny degree, my own experience of rejection.  I’ve never read anything else in literature quite like it: the intensity of the reactions from both characters, the realistic and painful dialogue, the terrible silence and awkwardness … it's brilliant writing, and it pretty much punched me in the gut the first time I read it.

Yet this reading experience was also cathartic and transformative.  It helped me, in a small way, to start reclaiming my own life-experience. Stories and literature can give us a voice.  They can also give us glimpses of healing. As Christian writers, of all people we should be able to see the Big Picture.  Our life stories are part of a bigger whole.  

The troubles of neurotic, privileged young people in the 1920s may not be your particular literary cup of tea.  That’s OK.  Whatever genre we write in – literary or popular fiction, devotional or inspirational, or memoir – as Christians we can provide readers with a window not just into their own lives, but a window onto ultimate healing and hope. And to write as well as Rosamond Lehmann did in this passage? – that’s certainly a goal.