In her 1967 memoir, The Swan in the Evening, Rosamond Lehmann relates walking one day during the Second World War with her five-year-old daughter. Without warning, the child said:
‘One day... one day... *<] One day I might call you and call you and call you< over the whole world. Over the whole world, and you might not answer. What shall I do then?’ Her voice seemed to toll. Taken aback, I quickly promised her that I would always answer.
‘You mean you won’t die?’
‘I mean I won’t die.’
*<+ Often and often as the years went on I returned to that scene, that hour. Who was it in a child’s body suddenly adopting such a voice? How could I have promised her that I would never die?1
This child’s voice, ‘toll*ing+,’ echoes and resounds with the multiplicity of such voices of children in wartime, children who ‘call you and call you and call you... over the whole world. Over the whole world.’ This child bears witness to the silenced children, speaking for them, ‘adopting such a voice.’ Lyndsey Stonebridge has pointed out that ‘*t+he traumatised children of the late 1930s and 1940s speak to an anxiety – maybe we could even say that they become symbols of an anxiety – about what it means to exist at all in wartime,’ and argues that this ‘takes us to a much darker place than perhaps is usually allowed when we think about representations of childhood and war.’2 Wartime childhood, this suggests, is mutated; innocence, the ‘pure form’, is corrupted, and a monstrous Other takes its place. ‘Children speak’, says Janet Watts of Lehmann’s war narratives, ‘through spaces, as well as through speech; and their silences can hold more truth than all the rest of human communication and conversation.’3 But what is perhaps more disturbing than the child’s awareness of the possibility of loss, death, or trauma, is the uncanny sense, for Lehmann, that this was not her child speaking: ‘Who was it in a child’s body suddenly adopting such a voice?’ The wartime child, it seems, has some monstrous knowledge of pain not recognised by their parents at the same age, and forcibly suppressed by them now.
Lehmann’s memoir attests to the experience of the wartime parent encountering a new creature: the wartime child. This essay will explore the ways in which this anxiety about wartime childhood and parenting is also addressed in her short fiction, itself a monstrous product of war, and a genre Lehmann adopted only during that time. Indeed, Watts says of the stories that ‘they are probably the nearest this writer ever came to straightforward and unguarded reminiscence.’4 The stories are precise, unflinching, personal; as Elizabeth Bowen terms her own work, they are ‘studies of climate, war-climate.’5 The Swan in the Evening and The Gipsy’s Baby both attest to this ‘war-climate,’ what I see as a climate of anxiety. It is possible to locate in these texts not only child and adult anxiety regarding death and war – what Lehmann calls, in her short story ‘When the Waters Came’ (1946), a ‘monstrous child.’6 Even more specifically, the adult describes an anxiety about anxiety itself, manifested in Lehmann’s memoir as the desire to protect the child from apprehension (and, in fact, a subsequent concern about precisely this attempt to allay the child’s unease). Is it her own anxiety which the adult hears in the child? Is it possible that in such writing the child becomes the mouthpiece for adult anxiety?
This kind of psychological tension between parent and child naturally recalls Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s model of the cryptophore, a carrier of unspoken secrets (or a ‘transgenerational phantom’) passed down from an adult (usually the parent) to the child.7 The cryptophore presents the symptoms of trauma, but does not appear to have firsthand experience of such an event. Rather, it seems, she is assailed by the traumatic memory of another. As such, the cryptophore is importantly distinguished from the hysteric in that she does not actively keep or repress her own secrets; instead, she unwittingly preserves and enacts the traumatic secret of an ancestor. In this way, as Esther Rashkin points out, we can ‘say that the child haunted by a phantom becomes the unwitting performative agent of a gap in the speech of a parent.’8 In The Swan in the Evening, then, Lehmann’s daughter ‘adopts’ or performs the adult’s unspoken anxiety that she will be prevented from fulfilling her expected role as protector; the child enacts her knowledge of the adult’s silenced fear.
Three stories in The Gipsy’s Baby – ‘Wonderful Holidays,’ ‘A Dream of Winter,’ and ‘When the Waters Came’ – are narratives which express the anxiety of the single mother responsible for two children, an anxiety compounded by that ‘climate’ of ‘war, of winter, of privation and ill health.’9 ‘When the Waters Came,’ in particular, makes clear this overlap between children, war, and other practical kinds of anxiety. The story thus becomes a vehicle to consider not only the ‘representations of childhood and war,’ but also informs the ways in which Lehmann writes, and writes war. In form and in content Lehmann’s short fiction, product of wartime, anxiously strives for a textual forgetting. That is, Lehmann’s narrative conception seeks to displace its own origins, to bury the monstrous child of lurking war and to maintain a façade of silence. The anxiety that this monster will be unearthed haunts Lehmann’s short stories, and in particular ‘When the Waters Came,’ which can be read as a textual representation of anxiety.
This paper will adhere to a Freudian conceptualisation of anxiety, formulated in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), and still widely used and adhered to in psychoanalytic literature. Anxiety-preparedness, or Angstbereitschaft is an active response to, or a state of preparedness for, the anticipated passivity of the foreseen ‘danger-situation.’ Jean-Michel Quinodoz, with reference to Freud’s text, explains that:
[w]hen the individual becomes able to foresee a danger-situation and to prepare for it, instead of waiting passively until it arrives, this denotes an important advance in the capacity for self-protection. In this situation of expectation – the danger-situation – the ego can send out a ‘signal of anxiety.’10
Anxiety occurs in anticipation of a traumatic event, and is born of the desire to avoid the repetition of the traumatic past. It is a reaction to that which is remembered but has not yet occurred again. If, Sigmund Freud notes, ‘*t+he present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic experiences I have had before *<] I will anticipate the trauma and behave as though it had already come, while there is yet time to turn aside.’ 11 Anxiety, or ‘dreading forward,’ to use Stonebridge’s term, figures the paradoxical experience of fear in reaction to that which is expected, but has not yet happened.12
In this simultaneous memory and dread of trauma, such presence of mind is especially relevant for what is sometimes termed ‘The Phoney War’, the months between September 1939 and May 1940 during which, after the declaration of war, Germany’s expected assault upon Britain and France did not happen. Instead, Robert Mackay notes, there was ‘an anti-climax’, and a ‘strangely unreal period of ‚non-war‛ began in which the principal powers formally at war made no serious moves to engage one another in battle.’13 It is in this time of uncertainty that Lehmann’s ‘When the Waters Came’ is set. The memory of the First World War had, Mackay points out, ‘scarcely faded’ when war in Europe resumed.14 This sense of insecurity was compounded by the ‘Phoney War’, because although, as Lehmann’s narrator observes in the story’s first paragraph, ‘*n+othing very disturbing was likely to happen for the present,’ the final three words of that phrase admit to the possibility of an all-too-familiar ‘disturbing’ future:
Very long ago, during the first winter of the present war, it was still possible to preserve enough disbelief in the necessity for disaster to waver on with only a few minor additions and subtractions in the old way. The first quota of evacuated children had meant a tough problem for the local ladies; but most of them, including her own, had gone back to London. Nothing very disturbing was likely to happen for the present. One thought, of course, of sailors freezing in unimaginable wastes of water, perhaps to be plunged beneath them between one violent moment and the next; of soldiers numb in the black-and-white nights on sentry duty, crammed, fireless, uncomforted on the floors of empty barns and disused warehouses. In her soft bed, she thought of them with pity – masses of young men, betrayed, helpless, and so much colder, more uncomfortable than human beings should be. But they remained unreal, as objects of pity frequently remain. The war sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too big to get born it would die in the womb and be shovelled underground, disgracefully, as monsters are, and after a while, with returning health and a change of scene, we would forget that we conceived it. Lovers went on looking on the bright side, stitching cosy linings, hopeful of saving and fattening all the private promises. The persisting cold, the catastrophes of British plumbing, took precedence of the war as everybody’s topic and experience. It became the political situation. Much worse for the Germans, of course. Transport had broken down, there was no coal in Berlin. They’d crack – quite likely – morale being so low already. (‘WC’ 93)
‘When the Waters Came’ begins with a syntactically twisted sentence that describes the strange state of ‘war’ at the time. The attempt at stoicism – ‘it was still possible to preserve enough disbelief’ – is disrupted by an unbidden surfacing of the knowledge of ‘masses of young men, betrayed,’ then quickly transferred to an obligatory ‘pity.’ Anxiety about the failure to care for the young operates, in this story, on a national and a personal level, but as a representation of maternal guilt and anxiety, the long opening paragraph seems to be engaged in a battle against the uncertain presence of the war, as it repeatedly rises into view and then subsides, like the sailors ‘plunged beneath *the waves+ between one violent moment and the next’. The trauma of war is by turns acknowledged and suppressed, remembered and deliberately pushed aside in a determination to look ‘on the bright *read: British+ side’.
Stonebridge argues that psychoanalytic practice during the Second World War involved an attempt to confront the way ‘that war settles into the darkest parts of our being, and into our understanding of ourselves as both subjects of war and of a politics – of a ‚civilisation‛ – that legitimised war.’15 The first paragraph of ‘When the Waters Came’ figures this need to come to terms with what ‘civilisation’ has produced, while at the same time hoping that such horror will not eventuate. This can be seen in a particularly striking metaphor: ‘The war sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too big to get born it would die in the womb and be shovelled underground, disgracefully, as monsters are, and after a while, with returning health and a change of scene, we would forget that we conceived it’. The ‘Phoney War,’ in the simile, is described as ‘like a child,’ but more than this, as a monster: a monstrous child. It is ‘too big to get born,’ unnatural, a misconception, a mutant mistake. ‘When the Waters Came’ thus presents a conflating anxiety about what ‘civilisation’ produces or ‘legitimise*s+’: war and children. ‘When the Waters Came’ simultaneously describes the desire to protect the ‘graceful’ child from knowledge of the monstrous and ‘disgraceful’ sibling, and the uncanny presence or performance of that buried secret in the wartime child.
It is worth noting that similar imagery appears in Lehmann’s 1953 novel, The Echoing Grove; indeed, Panthea Reid Broughton recognises that the overwhelming presence of stillbirth imagery in that novel is mirrored by ‘images of burial, as characters try to bury what they do not want to face.’16 And in Lehmann’s 1944 piece, The Ballad and the Source, it is suggested that the burial of such monsters, such ‘shovell*ing+ underground,’ is far from permanent:
But violence! – that I do fear. The lid blown off suddenly in your face – and oh! what comes out of the black cauldron...? *<+ Horrors! – that don’t shrivel up harmlessly in the air and light of day, and drop back into the stew they came from, but swell to monsters that nobody dreamed of and nobody can deal with. ... Ravaging monsters that live for ever! . . .17
If the monster is a warning (from the Latin monere), it is one that must be heeded. Emphatically (as The Ballad and the Source notes, but ‘When the Waters Came’ seeks to forget), violence, horror, monsters, cannot be safely buried; in fact, the attempt to repress such things only makes them more frightening, makes them ‘swell’ and grow. Moreover, the knowledge of this produces further anxiety: we begin to dread the return of the repressed, the monster. We are always watching, anxious, breathless for its return, at once remembering and preparing to feel its effects. And this ‘monster,’ The Ballad and the Source makes clear a few pages later, is ‘human experience.’18
Referring to Freud’s attempt to understand the (re)production of war, Jacqueline Rose writes that
civilisation has its ‘advantages and perils’; we owe to it ‘the best of what we have become as well as a good part of what we suffer from.’ If, therefore, war neither simply threatens nor simply advances the cause of civilisation, it is because it mimics or participates in the fundamental ambivalence of civilisation itself.19
It is this kind of ambivalence or anxiety about civilisation or modernity which is demonstrated in ‘When the Waters Came,’ a narrative which, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) seems to be trying to come to terms with the paradox of the human capacity to create monstrosity. In the earlier novel, civilisation itself becomes monstrous, inhuman, when we ignore, abandon, or bury that which was created. Clare Hanson has persuasively argued that we should read Frankenstein as a text which ‘considers the potentially destructive power of an inadequate uterine environment.’20 It is possible to identify something similar in ‘When the Waters Came,’ because of this anxiety about civilisation, about an ‘inadequate’ environment that could produce this monstrous child. The title, evocative of the labour of childbirth, announces a text which recalls the birth of a monstrosity, and also encrypts another suggestive title: ‘When the War Came.’ But in this story anxiety also surrounds the sense that the war means that the mother has failed to provide an appropriate environment for her children, that perhaps she is a disastrous or monstrous mother.
As I have discussed, anxiety is ‘protection’ against the event of an expected traumatic future; it tries to mitigate the agony of helplessness, first experienced, Freud and Melanie Klein both posit, in infancy.21 One may here again draw parallels with the work of Bowen, for whom, in childhood, ‘*t+wo things are terrible [...]: helplessness (being in other people’s power) and apprehension – the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.’22 But there is an important distinction to be made here, and it is one Stonebridge also touches on when she states that ‘*t+he anxiety of children is understandable because they are so clearly stuck in a situation that they cannot comprehend. Adult helplessness *<+ is more troubling.’23 Children’s anxiety is understandable, it is familiar, and in some ways, safe; adult anxiety or helplessness is not. Lehmann’s wartime writing does (at least) two things with this: first, it represents the troubling, even guilty, sense that children in these texts are experiencing anxiety of the adult kind. Second, Lehmann’s wartime fiction demonstrates an attempt to refuse anxiety. Ironically, given Abraham and Torok’s understanding of the transgenerational phantom, this is done in order to protect children, in their ‘awful vulnerability’, from fear, or from the apprehension Bowen describes.24
The earlier example from The Swan in the Evening is striking in this respect. The child verbalises precisely her mother’s fear of loss and separation (‘One day I might call you and call you and call you [...] and you might not answer’); desperate to comfort her child, and baffled by this expression of monstrous knowledge, Lehmann makes the impossible promise to ‘never die,’ thereby seeking to protect her daughter from fear by dismissing it. Initially this works as the displacement and subsequent rejection of the mother’s own anxiety; that is, because a child’s anxiety is seen to be generalised or unfounded, this anxiety can be comforted, dissipated, or kissed away. This dismissal of fear can also be seen in ‘When the Waters Came,’ when Jane’s repeated query regarding the safety of rushing flood water is met with her mother’s misrecognition of the scene of danger and death, as one of springtime hope:
‘Is it safe? *...+ Has anything got drowned, Mummy?’
‘No. The cows and horses are all safe indoors. Only all the old dead winter sticks and leaves are going away. Look at them whirling past.’
The water ran so fast and feverish, carrying winter away. The earth off the ploughed fields made a reddish stain in it, like blood, and stalks of last year’s dead corn were mixed and tumbled in it. She remembered The Golden Bough, the legend of Adonis, from whose blood the spring should blossom; the women carrying pots of dead wheat and barley to the water, flinging them in with his images. Sowing the spring. (‘WC’ 96)
However, The Swan in the Evening and ‘When the Waters Came’ both make clear that such comfort is quickly replaced by the mother’s guilt. These texts thus express a tension between aspects of anxiety about children in wartime that roughly correspond to readiness and repression. That is, should the parent admit anxiety so that the child is prepared for the future traumatic event? Or should she refuse anxiety in order to preserve the child’s innocence and delay the experience of fear?
This anxiety of mothering is present as the protagonist and her two children, John and Jane, stand by the whirling flood created by the thaw: ‘Where were all the other children? Gathered by parents indoors for fear of the water?’ (95) It is in part the mother’s failure to read the danger of the flood as the other parents have – her failure to read the ‘dead’ sticks and leaves ‘lost almost at once’ in the whirl of the ‘feverish’ water with its ‘reddish stain *<+ like blood’ – which leads to what is almost a disaster. This fevered and blood-stained environment can neither signal nor support a healthy child. Jane’s almost drowning in the dangerously breaking waters, her tiny face bobbing between the waves, so like those of the unfortunate sailors at the story’s beginning, is figured as a consequence of her mother’s refusal to read her own anxiety, and the repression of her instinct for preparedness:
Oh, they’re beginning to look very far away, with water all round them. It can’t be dangerous, I mustn’t shout. They were tiny, and separated.
‘Stay together!’
She began to run along the bank, seeing what would happen; or causing it to happen. It did happen, a moment before she got there. Jane, rushing forward to seize a branch, went down. Perfectly silent, her astonished face framed in its scarlet bonnet fixed on her brother, her Wellingtons waterlogged, she started to sink, to sway and turn with the current and be carried away. (‘WC’ 97)
The denial or repression of anxiety, the self-silencing ‘I mustn’t shout’ is, as in the story’s opening paragraph, ineffective, as the panicky instruction, ‘Stay together!’ and the knowledge of disaster, bursts through. There is also an ambiguity here about the function of maternal anxiety: does the mother ‘*see+ what would happen,’ or does she cause it? Anxiety here is suggested to tempt fate – to expect the ‘danger-situation’ is to make it happen; on the other hand, the repression of anxiety, the refusal to acknowledge danger keeps the danger-situation at bay. Thus, although permitting her own anxiety would have prepared her for the danger-situation, not only in terms of ‘self-protection,’ but also in terms of the protection of the children – whose ‘astonish*ment+’ reveals their inexperience or lack of preparedness – the mother maintains the illusion that to permit anxiety is also to permit danger, when in fact the allowance of her anxiety would have prepared her, enabled her to recognise danger, and thus, possibly, have prevented the disaster.
In the immediate aftermath of the event, the mother feels ‘the weight of her own guilt and Jane’s and John’s, struggling together without words in lugubrious triangular reproach and anxiety’ (97). Anxiety is a lesson learned; the mother, guilty of failing to see in time, will next time be prepared. Yet even as the family recovers, this progress is dissipated by a sweeping denial – ‘*b+ut by the end of the day it was all right’ – and the ‘vanish*ing+’ of disaster ‘into the boothole with the appalling lumps of mud, into the clothes-basket *<+ down the plug’ (97). It is finally Jane who must point out her mother’s failure to read danger, and perhaps, her need to feel anxiety on behalf of her children. As if in response to the free indirect discourse of the maternal or narratorial silent admission of danger – ‘What will the spring bring? Shall we be saved?’ – she notes ‘you were wrong about one thing, Mummy *<+ About nothing being . . . you know *<+ Drowned. *<+ I sor a chicking’ (98). Jane, like Sally in Lehmann’s memoir, demonstrates the traumatic symptoms of the cryptophore as she voices her mother’s anxiety and attests to the potential for the deaths of the innocent. For Jane to state ‘I sor’ a drowned ‘chicking’, or for Sally to imagine calling a mother who cannot answer, is to anticipate a death which will one day be her own. This horrific knowledge that maternal care cannot prevent this inevitable event is precisely the anxiety that the mothers – Lehmann, and the narrator of ‘When the Waters Came’ – seek to delay.
It would thus seem that ‘When the Waters Came’ is not, as Phyllis Lassner suggests, a ‘dramatisation of ‚the way motherhood provides the initiative to reimagine a nation’s fate,‛’ but a text which is anxious about the tension between the need for the mother to recognise anxiety on behalf of the child, and the desire to maintain the façade of safety, synonymous with the promise never to die.25 Because the readiness of anxiety, or ‘dreading forward,’ is in many ways a kind of already experiencing of the future trauma, to downplay or even deny adult anxiety means that the child will not feel fear before she has to – to repress or refuse to acknowledge anxiety is an attempt not so much to delay danger, as to delay the experience of fear.26 This is evident in another event recalled in The Swan in the Evening, similar to the central almost-disaster of ‘When the Waters Came’: a boat trip Lehmann took with her children had quickly become dangerous in a sudden storm and, she relates, she feared they would all drown. While frantically bailing water from the boat, however, she sought to protect her daughter from apprehension, so that the child was, rather than terrified, only smiling and enjoying the adventure: ‘I wondered, supposing we really had been going to drown, could I have taken her through it without fear? I thought yes, perhaps I could have.’27
The understanding of anxiety and monstrous children discussed in this essay is, moreover, complicated by the metaphors Lehmann uses about her wartime writing. Birth metaphors, indeed, condition Lehmann’s work: her brother John comments of The Gipsy’s Baby collection that ‘*e+ach story was a difficult birth,’ while Lehmann herself said of her other wartime piece, The Ballad and the Source, that she felt as if she had been ‘delivered, after a prolonged labour, of a monster.’28 Similarly, in an essay written not long after the publication of that novel, Lehmann expressed the hope that the environment of the post-war years might be conducive to what Sydney Janet Kaplan calls ‘a new kind of fiction’: ‘Perhaps this great novel is still to be written. If it is to be born, I think it will not be in England but in some country whose inhabitants have undergone a great communal death and rebirth.’29 In Rosamond Lehmann’s and John Lehmann’s repetition of birth imagery to describe her wartime writing, it is not only expected or unborn war that is monstrous, then, but also the representation of it, the rendering of trauma or anxiety in and as art. This is, perhaps, the ethical turn of Lehmann’s wartime writing, and especially, her short fiction: the way in which it not only seeks to engage with, but to figure formally a textual representation, or birth, of the tensions of wartime anxiety.
Notes
Rosamond Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967) (London: Virago, 1982), 80-81. Return
Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture, Language, Discourse, Society, ed. by Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, and Denise Riley (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48-49. Return
Janet Watts, Introduction (1981) to The Gipsy’s Baby and Other Stories (1946) (London: Virago, 1982), vii-xiii (xiii). Return
Ibid, viii. Return
Elizabeth Bowen, Postscript to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. by Hermione Lee (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 94-99 (95). Return
Rosamond Lehmann, ‘When the Waters Came’ in The Gipsy’s Baby, 93-98 (93). Hereafter referred to as ‘WC.’ Return
Nicolas Abraham, and Maria Torok, ‘The Topography of Reality: Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets’ (1971), in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 157-61 (158). Return
Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 94-95. Return
Watts, Introduction, p. xii. Return
Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings, trans. by David Alcorn (London: Routledge, 2005), 223. Return
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. by Alix Strachey, International Psycho-analytical Library 28 (London: Hogarth, 1936), 161. Return
Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, 6. Return
Robert Mackay, The Test of War: Inside Britain, 1939-45 (London: UCLP, 1999), 6. Return
Ibid., 1. Return
Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, 2. Return
Panthea Reid Broughton, ‘Narrative License in The Echoing Grove,’ South Central Review 1.1/2 (1984), 85-107 (98). Return
Rosamond Lehmann, The Ballad and the Source (1944), Virago Modern Classics 94 (London: Virago, 1982), 24. Return
Ibid., 47. Return
Jacqueline Rose, Why War? – Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein, The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory, ed. by Michael Payne, and Harold Schweizer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 16. Return
Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750-2000 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 49. Return
Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, 4. Return
Elizabeth Bowen, Preface to Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu (1947) in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. by Hermione Lee (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 100-13 (111). Return
Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, 54. Return
Lehmann’s short stories, states Niall Griffiths, are ‘terribly sad, their main concern is with the awful vulnerability of people and animals, the appalling fragility of their soft bodies and souls’ (‘Fragile Lives,’ The Guardian 27 Jan. 2007 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007> 18 Apr. 2009, n.p.). Return
Phyllis Lassner, cited in Wendy Pollard, Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 106-7. Return
Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety, 6. Return
Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening, 79-80. Return
John Lehmann and Rosamond Lehmann, cited in Pollard, Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics, 101, 102. Return
Rosamond Lehmann, cited in Sydney Janet Kaplan, ‘Rosamond Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source: A Confrontation with ‚The Great Mother,‛ Twentieth Century Literature 27.2 (1981), 127-45 (129). Return