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 catastro...