ROSAMOND LEHMANN
A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquility.” You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.
Thank you, Vickie, for the reminder of a wonderful novelist. I was immersed in her books twenty years ago and you’ve inspired me to revisit them. The only one I’m wary of is The Swan in the Evening.
I just heard about her while reading Anne Scott-James memoir, and I was intrigued. I will be visiting Ms. Lehmann for the first time when I get to the library this weekend 😉 . I also am going to see if a contemporary of hers is on the shelf…Lesley Blanch. I suspect I will be in for some very good reading.
Hemingway said something similar in “A Moveable Feast”, no? He wrote about the midwest while living in Paris, then planned to write about Paris when he lived someplace else…