Dusty Answer

By Rosamond Lehmann

Book Overview

Mamma was fast asleep at home, her spirit lapped in unconsciousness. Her dreams would not divine that her daughter had stolen out to meet a lover. And next door also they slept unawares, while one of them broke from the circle and came alone to clasp a stranger . . .' Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, has always been a little in love with each of the four cousins who come to stay next door and, on her return from Cambridge, becomes madly in love with one of them - Roddy, the 'sensation-hunter'. DUSTY ANSWER traces with delicate nostalgia childhood friendships and the pangs of thwarted young love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844082946
• ISBN13: 9781844082940
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

intense and impassioned

_Dusty Answer_ was Lehmann's first novel, published in 1927 when she was just 26. Sales were slow and not much critical notice was taken of the book until Alfred Noyes gave it a glowing review in the Sunday Times, making _Dusty Answer_ a bestseller almost overnight. Its heroine, Judith Earle, is an intelligent, earnest girl who becomes entangled in the lives of five cousins who have occasionally visited at the house next door to Judith's; Judith played with them as a child, and years later, comes to know them again as she enters adulthood. When they reenter her life, she falls desperately in love with one of them. It often lacks narrative drive (especially in the rather uncertain, diffuse ending), but its intense, often idyllic, and impassioned style is compelling, a foretaste of things to come.

Very well written

This is the kind of book that you can re-read. (I have several times.) It's really very sad that it and so many of Rosamond Lehmann's other books are out of print. The plot is about a young English girl who falls in love with the family next door...over several years, as she grows up, goes to Cambridge, goes out into the world she keeps meeting various members and has relationships with them. If you like English writers like Elizabeth Taylor or Mary Webb as well as "women's fiction" I would highly recommend not only this book but Lehmann's others, especially "Invitation to the Waltz" and "The Weather in the Streets."