Rosamond Lehmann: A Life
Selina Hastings
Chatto & Windus, £25, pp352

As a teenage reader in the early Sixties I had an addiction to fated heroines driven by one all-consuming, unsatisfactory love, such as The Constant Nymph (a favourite of Rosamond Lehmann's) or Elizabeth Bowen's dangerous innocents, Emmeline and Portia. I couldn't get enough of Lehmann's Olivia Curtis, or those scenes in Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets, where she meets the handsome Rollo Spencer, exuding upper-class confidence, first on the terrace at the ball, where he rescues her from her shy awkwardness, and years later in a train's restaurant car.

The moment Rollo enters, in a tweed overcoat, with a dog under his arm and a copy of the Times , orders sausages and scrambled eggs, and smiles across at her, you know that Olivia has met her fate. Doomed Chick Lit, this might be called, and it's a passé genre, alas - only Anita Brookner, a friend of Lehmann's, still does it. Lehmann's heroines want to please and be loved, give up their lives to one man, are exploited or betrayed, and suffer loneliness and rejection - not to mention secret abortions, social ostracism, or the loss of a child. There is no political agenda - 'I dislike feminist demonstrations,' Rollo tells Olivia, and she quickly agrees - but there is a completely compelling intimacy with these women's vulnerable lives.

At 13, I read her for the emotions; 20 years later, returning to her in the Virago greenbacks that reignited her reputation, I became aware of her brilliant social detail, sharp ironies, and vivid, naturalistic dialogue. Her life story began to intrigue me: were these all autobiographical novels? And she featured in so many other people's stories. She was the great beauty who swept Goronwy Rees, that slippery chancer, from under Elizabeth Bowen's nose. (The greater writer eventually forgave her rival.) She was the devoted friend of Strachey and Carrington, the intimate of the strange, inscrutable Henry Yorke, the one woman friend and writer who seemed to pose no threat to Virginia Woolf.

In the Eighties, I saw her once or twice with Carmen Callil, the friend of her late years: a vast, moon-faced apparition in floating colours, violet/white hair, and lashings of make-up. As John Bayley once said, she loomed over you like a ship's figurehead.

Now she gets her own life story, from another addicted childhood reader who had the advantage - and the challenge - of knowing her intimately, through family connections. Selina Hastings keeps this to the very end, but her close knowledge of Lehmann colours the whole picture. And a gorgeous piece of work it is, exactly right for its subject: fast-paced, vivid, bursting with characters, gossip and emotions, a book you want to gobble up like the box of chocolates which was Hastings's last present to the 90-year-old Lehmann, eagerly received. But some of these chocolates have bitter centres.

Hastings is as good as her subject at social class and English lifestyles, and she gives an eloquent picture of the middle-class childhood on the banks of the Thames, the place Lehmann often returned to in her imagination, with the dilettanteish, charming, sportsman father, the puritanical New England mother and the talented, beautiful children, three of whom were made for the arts. Like their sister, Beatrix, the Communist actress and John, the poet and editor, could take themselves very seriously in later life: as Stephen Spender (always in combat with John Lehmann) once said, the Lehmanns think they're the Brontë sisters, but in fact they're the Marx Brothers. Hastings takes quite a tough line with these glamorous egotists. She doesn't spare the quarrels between the siblings, or John's 'monstrous self-absorption', or Rosamond's snobbishness and 'tremendous ego'. But she is also profoundly sympathetic to a story often as painful as that of any of Lehmann's heroines.

Rosamond had her heart broken at Cambridge (Twenties Girton is perfectly described) by her favourite type, a cool, dashing Etonian, and made a disastrous marriage on the rebound to Leslie Runciman, of a tough Methodist ship-owning family. 'Our sex life was a disgrace to sex,' she wrote later. As he had a neurotic horror of having children, she had a traumatic abortion. This was what she would call, snootily, her 'bleak period of exile in the detested North of England', in Liverpool and Newcastle. (It provided powerful material, 'far from gay', for her second novel, A Note in Music ). She escaped by writing her first book, Dusty Answer , a hugely successful story of thwarted young love, and through a love affair with the alluring upper-class painter, Wogan Phillips, whom she married after a long battle for divorce.

Yet this second marriage in turn became a conflict between two self-absorbed, beautiful charmers. 'Ros and Wog' created an enchanted but short-lived idyll at their Oxfordshire house at Ipsden, surrounded by Bloomsbury friends like Siegfried Sassoon and Dadie Rylands. (Remember, Virginia Woolf told her at one particularly alcoholic, free-spoken Bloomsbury party in the early Thirties, 'We won this for you.') But there were tensions over her absorption in their two children, Hugo, and, especially, Sally; over Wogan's infidelities, and his escapades to Paris and to the Spanish Civil War. Though she wrote her best novels during this period, and had great success ( The Weather in the Streets was a tremendous hit, in France even more than in England and the United States), the marriage ended badly.

The catalyst was her affair with Goronwy Rees, whose involvement with Burgess and Blunt would come back to haunt her, and who - typically - let her down badly. Some fine autobiographical stories, published in The Gypsy's Baby , come from this time: 'Life doesn't arrange stories with happy endings any more, see? Never again,' the heroine of A Dream of Winter tells herself. She was right: the pattern was repeated in her forties with the next great love of her life, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who vacillated ineffectually and selfishly for eight years between his wife and his glamorous but impossibly demanding mistress, and then took a brutal and sudden route out of the impasse, going off with the much younger, and sexier Jill Balcon. (Hugo, who hated Day-Lewis, had a point, when he burst out as a schoolboy: 'He only wants you for his poetry!') Rosamond's life-long state of 'entrenched vindictiveness' towards the Day-Lewises is as grotesque as it was pitiful. (There's a scene when she hits him, very hard, at a Chatto & Windus party in 1955). But this gruesome story is quickly overtaken by hernext appalling tragedy, the sudden death, at 24, of her daughter Sally, recently married to the poet Patrick Kavanagh.

Rosamond's devotion to Sally and the unbearable blow of her death plunged her into an intense commitment to spiritualism. She convinced herself Sally was not dead, and that she was in contact with her. A touching late book, The Swan in the Evening , shows how deeply she had made herself believe that we 'go on' in the immaterial world. This is difficult material, and Hastings treats it admirably, making us see that she had to 'shut down her reason' to survive, but allowing herself some dry humour (unlike Lehmann) at the information provided by 'sensitives' such as Mrs Ena Twigg (Sally was being advised by St Francis how to teach the unborn birds to sing) and the psychic expert, Tudor Pole, 'only a part-time visitor to Planet Earth'.

Hastings is restrained, however, in comparison to Lehmann's sceptical Bloomsbury friends, such as Dadie Rylands, who used to read out Rosamond's contributions to the Journal of the College of Psychic Studies with screams of laughter over breakfast. The most measured and wise response came from Stevie Smith, who, reviewing The Swan in the Evening , wrote: 'If you believe in God you will let the dying go, glad that the pain of loss is ours, not theirs.' But Rosamond found this hard to forgive.

Hastings's tone darkens as Lehmann becomes the difficult older woman she knew, always avid for attention and admiration - the woman who wrote sadly, in her fifties, to her friend Bernard Berenson (who told her flatteringly that she had replaced Edith Wharton in his life) that she wanted 'a hand in mine, that, once taken and given, will never let mine go'.

Many late affairs and friendships foundered on the rock of her 'ceaseless demands', her 'illusions and self-deceptions', her 'destructive emotional games'. So much emphasis is placed on this that I wonder whether the conflicts Hastings had with her in life have skewed the portrait, in the end, too much towards the grotesque.

Could Lehmann's courage, her commitment to public service (her international work as president of Pen, for instance), her lasting appetite for friendship, have been more emphasised? And Hastings's briskly rational approach, her clear plot summaries, don't quite catch the elusive, haunting, almost dream-like shimmering quality of those wonderful young woman's novels of the Twenties and Thirties. But it's the mark of a fine and compelling biography that one immediately wants to sit down and argue with its author.

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