A NOTE IN MUSIC

‘I … feel like a non-too-fresh vegetable,’ commented Lehmann after the success of Dusty Answer. ‘It is depressing & I keep on hearing of people who say: “Of course I always knew she'd never write more than one book.” Brrr! I'll show ‘em, - and produce a genius into the bargain.’ The ‘genius’ was a playful reference to the birth of her son, Hugo, who arrived in August 1929, a few months before the appearance of A Note in Music early the following year. Readers who had hoped for a continuation of the breathless ardour that had characterized Lehmann's first book were disappointed. A Note in Music is relentlessly downbeat, echoing the inertia of its central character, Grace Fairfax, who drifts through a bleak marriage with little to occupy her days or her interest. The mood mirrored the despondency of Lehmann's own early married life in northern provincial cities, when, away from the warmth of her family and her stylish, cosmopolitan friends, she felt singularly bereft of intellectual companionship and sympathy.

In April 1928 on holiday in the south of France, she reported dejectedly, ‘I have written a sort of prelude or first section and am now stuck, & feel rather gloomy – But I'm hoping light will be vouchsafed to me soon’. Positive encouragement was forthcoming from Virginia Woolf, an admirer of Dusty Answer, whose searching questions may well have provoked Lehmann to think in new directions. ‘Are you writing about the same people’, enquired Woolf, ‘or have you come out in an entire new world from which you see all the old world, minute, miles & miles away?’ Woolf's words were uncannily prophetic. The sense of promise held out to Judith Earle at the end of Dusty Answer is withdrawn in Lehmann's next work, juvenile exuberance just an elusive memory for a new heroine whose decade of marital tedium is deficient in emotional and sexual fulfilment. It is likely that the starry-eyed relationship with Wogan Philipps in her own life also forced Lehmann to reflect with caustic distance on the lacunae in her marriage to Leslie Runciman.