Dusty Answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

Book Overview

Dusty Answer & is Judith Earle's story-her solitary childhood spent in the seclusion of her riverside house, her awkward, intense experiences at Cambridge rounded with passion and disillusionment, and her travels abroad with her elegant, socialite mother. Above all, this novel is about Judith's consuming relationship with the Fyfe family, who each fall in love with Judith, transforming her young womanhood.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156262908
• ISBN13: 9780156262903
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 375 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

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."