Nothing worse than approaching a book thinking it is one thing and then finding out it is quite another. I started Rosamond Lehmann under the massive misapprehension that it was a biography which would unravel for me the life and tempestuous loves of a novelist who has written so brilliantly about affairs of the heart… but ’twas not to be. On page 2 Gillian Tindall says with great firmness that she is a ‘non-biographer’. She pours scorn on the idea that it can be of any real importance how a writer was brought up or whom they have loved: what matters in the final analysis is what they actually write. So what faced me was ‘a work of both grateful recognition and deliberate exorcism.’ O lor. In other words a thesis, a bit of lit crit, on the novels of Rosamond Lehmann. Should I have sent the book straight back, hating as I do this kind of exercise? Give it twenty pages perhaps…

A wise decision because the examination of the texts of Rosamond Lehmann’s novels not only proved to be bearable but diverting. Gillian Tindall’s approach is impressively confident and assured. She has no intention of ducking the main issue which is that Rosamond Lehmann’s territory is ‘the human heart’ and that it is nonsense to suggest this makes her trivial – ‘hardly a minor or esoteric field’. (Quite so, and I wish they would make Gillian Tindall a Betty Trask Award judge forth-with.) She recounts briefly but skilfully how Rosamond Lehmann came to inhabit this field – how she was the beautiful daughter of cultured well-to-do parents and was brought up in a lovely house in the Thames Valley. This privileged background prepared her for one sort of life and then fate, or bad choices, presented her with another. Out of this surprising volte-face in her fortunes her writing was born. ‘A pattern was potentially there’ states Gillian Tindall and then, rather alarmingly, ‘writers dream and invent their future as well as meeting it, practising already in childhood on the themes … that are going to be explored and recreated again and again …’

These themes, in Rosamond Lehmann’s case, are identified as class, dead babies, war, love going bad. They emerge in Dusty Answer, published in 1927 when the author was 26, and continue right up to the publication in 1976 of The Sea Grape Tree when she was 75. To trace their development Gillian Tindall uses frequent and often lengthy extracts from the novels and manages to do so in such a way that they never seem interruptions. Gillian Tindall’s prose, though quite different in style and structure from Rosamond Lehmann’s, flows effortlessly in and out of these extracts in a way that is quite extraordinary. This is particularly so in the chapter on ‘Weather in the Streets’ which deals with ‘love going bad’ and heroines remaining outsiders. The abortion in this novel is admitted to be feeble stuff compared to what has appeared in fiction since, but it remains one of the most heartbreaking passages ever written on this painful subject. Why? Because, as Gillian Tindall demonstrates, the mental distress is as emphasised as the physical agony and danger. Interestingly, she includes a short passage expurgated at the time – absurdly so it now seems – which she translates from a French edition. Though not in the least sensational it is oddly moving and points up Gillian Tindall’s argument beautifully.

But in spite of the attraction of this exhaustive analysis there is still something unsatisfactory, something missing, at the end. It would be crass as well as unkind and insensitive to wonder if Rosamond Lehmann was worth such treatment but legitimate, surely, to wonder if it would have made more sense to put her in some kind of context. It is enough for Gillian Tindall that she loves the novels and has internalised them: it is not quite enough for the reader. Gillian Tindall dismisses at one point the idea that one particular novel was a feminist work and yet it is Rosamond Lehmann’s contribution, however unwittingly, to feminism that gives her writing its coherence and claims for her an important place in twentieth century fiction. If feminism was not such a distorted, misused term this would be apparent and if Gillian Tindall had taken that idea on board she could have given her scholarly study a relevance and even an excitement that it somehow lacks. As it is she has indeed, as she hoped, whetted the appetite for re-readings of Rosamond Lehmann’s novels and whetted this particular reader’s even more for that biography this turned out not to be: not a bad score.