WORLD WAR II

In September 1939, Lehmann's personal life was more than usually chaotic. Her marriage in tatters, she was in the throes of a frenzied love affair with the dashing young Welshman, Goronwy Rees, thirteen years her junior. Their meetings were infrequent and dependent on Rees's leave arrangements from the Royal Artillery, which he had joined pending the outbreak of war. In a weakened condition following a miscarriage, Lehmann returned home from hospital to find her house occupied by a group of evacuees from London's East End, two of whom were suffering from scarlet fever, posing a health risk both to the others and to her own two children. It might well have been this stark confrontation with the wretchedness of the British underclass, amidst the serenity of the Oxfordshire countryside, that stimulated her recollections of her own childhood and the startling class inequalities of the early decades of the century that as a young girl she had never thought to question.

‘If you examine the chief characters of all her novels, you will find that, however diverse their natures and their spheres, they have one attitude in common’, George Dangerfield had written after the publication of Invitation to the Waltz. ‘They all have their heads turned backwards, staring into the past.’ The Weather in the Streets had deviated from this pattern with its uncompromising gaze directed squarely on the contemporary scene. Now, with war on the horizon and surrounded by children, Lehmann reverted to familiar terrain, and turned to her memories for fictional inspiration. Her approach was not untypical of writers of this period, whose restoration of familiar, reassuring scenarios was not so much a denial of but a response to impending anarchy, still a vivid memory for a generation scarred by the Great War only two decades before. As her editor brother subsequently observed, there was a timely imperative to publish fiction ‘that came out of the deep exploration of the past that so many people had found since the war broke out gave meaning and spiritual fortification to the dissolving present’.

In 1936 John Lehmann had founded the pioneering periodical New Writing, a biannual anthology that aimed to create a forum for significant new literary voices.