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Rosamond Lehmann's enduring classic, told from the point of view of its seventeen-year-old heroine, who has been invited to her first dance Today is Olivia Curtis's seventeenth birthday. In exactly one week, she will attend her first dance. She is thrilled . . . and terrified. Will Tony Heriot ask her to dance? Will he even remember that they once attended the same costume party? What will she wear? Something bright and beautiful--red silk? In the handsome diary she receives as a gift, Olivia shares her innermost doubts and fears--about her pretty, confident older sister, Kate, her precocious baby brother, James, her eccentric country neighbors, and of course, the upcoming party, which she is sure will be the crowning event of her young life. Divided into three parts--Olivia's birthday, the day leading up to the party, and the breathtaking event itself--Invitation to the Waltz masterfully captures the conflicting emotions of a teenager on the threshold of womanhood. Will this be the night when all of Olivia's dreams come true?… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member herschelian
If ever a book was a period piece, this is. It is a snapshot of English upper middle-class life between the wars, when girls were still educated at home in a schoolroom by governesses, and the only future they were expected to have was marriage. It depicts a period of innocence of experience that
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has been lost to young women. Not that that is a bad thing in itself. The story is of two sisters, daughters of a prosperous household in England in 1920, and the week of their lives leading up to and during a 'coming-out' dance given by an aristocratic neighbour. Olivia has to nerve herself to attend this event and suffers agonies of apprehension and shyness, her dress is all wrong, she can't seem to manage small talk, and the whole evening is a mix of enjoyment and terror for her. We have all had a time in our lives when we had to suffer the frantic inward misery of initiation into a new situation, and in that respect this book will always chime with the reader, reminding them of what it is like to be an adolescent. I first read this as a teenager myself and absolutely adored it, and Lehmann's other book "Dusty Answer", and it is as fresh today as when I first read it, indeed as fresh as when it was written nearly 75 years ago. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kasthu
Invitation to the Waltz is one of those coming-of-age-stories. Unlike, for example, The Crowded Street, which focuses on a young woman’s entire coming-of-age experience, Invitation to the Waltz focuses on just one moment in seventeen-year-old Olivia Curtis’s life: a coming-out ball, the seminal
I think if I had read this book ten years ago, I would have completely identified with Olivia—she’s shy and retiring, and unsure of herself. Her dress is all wrong, she has no dance partners, and at one point in the evening she ends up with a smear of dust all over her face from leaning against a statue. Olivia experiences a large amount of anxiety over the evening, but there’s a dash of hope there as well. Olivia teenage plight is even rather touching at times, but Lehmann writes with humor as well. Since this novel takes place over the course of a single day and evening, there’s obviously not a lot of character development, but Rosamond Lehmann is skilled at getting into the head of her protagonist.
And yet Lehmann’s style of writing is a bit confusing; I found myself getting lost at several points while reading this novel. There are lots of short, choppy sentences that I had to read several times in order to funny understand. In essence, therefore, this isn’t a particularly easy book to read. Still, I love her descriptions, her characters, and the way that the tone of this novel made me feel: nostalgic. I look forward to reading the follow-up to this book, The Weather in the Streets (a novel about Olivia, ten years on).
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moment in the life of any girl of the period (approximately the 1920s). Olivia is neither the most beautiful nor the most vivacious girl at the party, and she’s apprehensive about the evening and all it entails. This is not one of those “high action” books, but it gives a lot of insight into the thoughts and feelings of a girl making the leap into adulthood.I think if I had read this book ten years ago, I would have completely identified with Olivia—she’s shy and retiring, and unsure of herself. Her dress is all wrong, she has no dance partners, and at one point in the evening she ends up with a smear of dust all over her face from leaning against a statue. Olivia experiences a large amount of anxiety over the evening, but there’s a dash of hope there as well. Olivia teenage plight is even rather touching at times, but Lehmann writes with humor as well. Since this novel takes place over the course of a single day and evening, there’s obviously not a lot of character development, but Rosamond Lehmann is skilled at getting into the head of her protagonist.
And yet Lehmann’s style of writing is a bit confusing; I found myself getting lost at several points while reading this novel. There are lots of short, choppy sentences that I had to read several times in order to funny understand. In essence, therefore, this isn’t a particularly easy book to read. Still, I love her descriptions, her characters, and the way that the tone of this novel made me feel: nostalgic. I look forward to reading the follow-up to this book, The Weather in the Streets (a novel about Olivia, ten years on).
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LibraryThing member lyzard
I seem be using the phrase “deceptively simple” a lot about my recent Virago reading. Certainly, upon the surface Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation To The Waltz could hardly be simpler: Olivia Curtis, a middle-class girl living in an English village in 1920, turns seventeen, gets a new dress, and
After briefly skittering around amongst the other members of the Curtis family, particularly the slightly older but considerably more poised sister, Kate, Lehmann settles down more or less permanently in Olivia’s consciousness as she travels towards a watershed in her life. Lehmann’s writing is warmed by her affectionate understanding of her heroine, teetering between the rituals and habits of childhood and a new and somewhat frightening life as an almost-woman. We follow Olivia through the week leading up to the party, the usual banal routine excitingly broken up by the new experiences of preparation; and the character of our heroine, or the lack thereof, is made amusingly plain via her inability to take a firm line with Miss Robinson, the neuralgic village dressmaker, whose skills unfortunately do not include a knack for accurate cutting, and in an encounter with a door-to-door lace-seller, who sums up her reluctant customer with devastating accuracy and eventually departs with the entirety of her slender finances.
The narrative stays predominantly within Olivia’s rather limited perception, with the result that those moments when we step outside it into a wider, deeper vision of the world around her are both startling and moving. As Olivia and Miss Robinson contemplate the flame-coloured silk which is to be the party dress, we are given a sudden glimpse into the latter’s suffocatingly narrow existence and thwarted dreams:
That was after the death of Mr Robinson, an able cheerful man---manager of a department in the mills, churchwarden, clerk to the Parish Council. Though Connie said We must all look after Mother now, and Gertie under emotional stress lost what little head she had and needed special care, and Mother said I need all my dear daughters around me now, God willing we shall never part in this life, I feel it won’t be long before I too Go Home---in spite of all this, she would---almost---have gone, and been the selfish one, the undutiful, the heartbreaker; and never come back to little Compton again. But of course she hadn’t done it. She didn’t even know that she disliked her mother. Enmeshed in those collapsible leather tentacles, she felt comfortable, developed poor health, had nerves; went out only on Wednesday afternoons...
The party for which Olivia and Kate are preparing is the “coming out” of Marigold Spencer, the daughter of the most prominent family in the neighbourhood. In their early lives, the Curtises and the Spencers were schooled and played together, but as young adults the class gap is beginning to make itself felt. The Curtis girls are no more than fringe-dwellers, lookers-on at the mysterious and glamorous world of house-parties, trips to London, fast cars and an almost religious devotion to sporting pursuits, as represented by the Spencers. Even for Kate, for whom the party will turn out to be almost literally a dream come true, the potential for mishap seems limitless. For Olivia, less attractive and less socially skilled than her sister, acutely self-conscious in her ill-cut dress, the party becomes a nightmare of pain spiked by occasional and generally unanticipated pleasure. Here, too, Rosamond Lehmann remains within Olivia’s bewildered consciousness, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about Cousin Etty’s adventures in London, about the defiantly maladjusted Peter Jenkins, and about the intimidating Lady Spencer, who suddenly, startlingly, lets her hair down.
In retreat from the shattering disillusionment of an encounter with her childhood sweetheart, Olivia is soothed by a moment of fellowship with Sir John Spencer – who she finds hiding from his own party in the library – and the son of the house, Rollo. For most readers, I imagine, Olivia’s passion for literature will be her most attractive characteristic. The early part of the novel finds her “in a trance of voluptuous anguish”, weeping copiously over her umpteenth reading of David Copperfield (“Enjoying yourself?” inquires Kate wryly – to which the answer is, of course, yes); while in perhaps her first truly comfortable moment at the party, she rattles off to Rollo a list of her favourite authors: the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen...although not Scott. And never, I think, is Olivia more sympathetic than in her unspoken response to the question of why she didn’t show up for a Girl Guides meeting:
“Olivia, you slacker, why didn’t you turn up at Guides last week?”
Why not say: Because I preferred to spend the afternoon on the schoolroom sofa reading East Lynne and eating nut-milk chocolate...because I loathe the beastly Guides.
“I had such an awful cold...”
As a new day dawns on the Curtis sisters in the wake of the party, nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. It is not the party itself but its repercussions that force Olivia out of the cocoon of her childhood and into the adult world, to the unwilling realisation that growing up means loss as well as gain:
She hurried on. When she got to the kitchen garden she started to run. Oh Kate! She’s not going to tell me. Everything’s changing, everything’s different. She ran for all she was worth down the path and out by the gate into the field. A pheasant burst out from the trees and shuddered into the air, clanking his raucous clockwork of alarm. She ran over the rough damp turf. I’m left behind, but I don’t care. I’ve got plenty to think about too. Everything crowded into her head at once. Timmy, Marigold, Rollo, Nicola, Archie, Peter, Maurice---words, looks, movements---simply extraordinary. Life--- She felt choked. Oh Kate!...
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attends her first adult party. However, this outline gives no hint of the sureness of Lehmann’s writing nor the clarity of her vision.After briefly skittering around amongst the other members of the Curtis family, particularly the slightly older but considerably more poised sister, Kate, Lehmann settles down more or less permanently in Olivia’s consciousness as she travels towards a watershed in her life. Lehmann’s writing is warmed by her affectionate understanding of her heroine, teetering between the rituals and habits of childhood and a new and somewhat frightening life as an almost-woman. We follow Olivia through the week leading up to the party, the usual banal routine excitingly broken up by the new experiences of preparation; and the character of our heroine, or the lack thereof, is made amusingly plain via her inability to take a firm line with Miss Robinson, the neuralgic village dressmaker, whose skills unfortunately do not include a knack for accurate cutting, and in an encounter with a door-to-door lace-seller, who sums up her reluctant customer with devastating accuracy and eventually departs with the entirety of her slender finances.
The narrative stays predominantly within Olivia’s rather limited perception, with the result that those moments when we step outside it into a wider, deeper vision of the world around her are both startling and moving. As Olivia and Miss Robinson contemplate the flame-coloured silk which is to be the party dress, we are given a sudden glimpse into the latter’s suffocatingly narrow existence and thwarted dreams:
That was after the death of Mr Robinson, an able cheerful man---manager of a department in the mills, churchwarden, clerk to the Parish Council. Though Connie said We must all look after Mother now, and Gertie under emotional stress lost what little head she had and needed special care, and Mother said I need all my dear daughters around me now, God willing we shall never part in this life, I feel it won’t be long before I too Go Home---in spite of all this, she would---almost---have gone, and been the selfish one, the undutiful, the heartbreaker; and never come back to little Compton again. But of course she hadn’t done it. She didn’t even know that she disliked her mother. Enmeshed in those collapsible leather tentacles, she felt comfortable, developed poor health, had nerves; went out only on Wednesday afternoons...
The party for which Olivia and Kate are preparing is the “coming out” of Marigold Spencer, the daughter of the most prominent family in the neighbourhood. In their early lives, the Curtises and the Spencers were schooled and played together, but as young adults the class gap is beginning to make itself felt. The Curtis girls are no more than fringe-dwellers, lookers-on at the mysterious and glamorous world of house-parties, trips to London, fast cars and an almost religious devotion to sporting pursuits, as represented by the Spencers. Even for Kate, for whom the party will turn out to be almost literally a dream come true, the potential for mishap seems limitless. For Olivia, less attractive and less socially skilled than her sister, acutely self-conscious in her ill-cut dress, the party becomes a nightmare of pain spiked by occasional and generally unanticipated pleasure. Here, too, Rosamond Lehmann remains within Olivia’s bewildered consciousness, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about Cousin Etty’s adventures in London, about the defiantly maladjusted Peter Jenkins, and about the intimidating Lady Spencer, who suddenly, startlingly, lets her hair down.
In retreat from the shattering disillusionment of an encounter with her childhood sweetheart, Olivia is soothed by a moment of fellowship with Sir John Spencer – who she finds hiding from his own party in the library – and the son of the house, Rollo. For most readers, I imagine, Olivia’s passion for literature will be her most attractive characteristic. The early part of the novel finds her “in a trance of voluptuous anguish”, weeping copiously over her umpteenth reading of David Copperfield (“Enjoying yourself?” inquires Kate wryly – to which the answer is, of course, yes); while in perhaps her first truly comfortable moment at the party, she rattles off to Rollo a list of her favourite authors: the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen...although not Scott. And never, I think, is Olivia more sympathetic than in her unspoken response to the question of why she didn’t show up for a Girl Guides meeting:
“Olivia, you slacker, why didn’t you turn up at Guides last week?”
Why not say: Because I preferred to spend the afternoon on the schoolroom sofa reading East Lynne and eating nut-milk chocolate...because I loathe the beastly Guides.
“I had such an awful cold...”
As a new day dawns on the Curtis sisters in the wake of the party, nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. It is not the party itself but its repercussions that force Olivia out of the cocoon of her childhood and into the adult world, to the unwilling realisation that growing up means loss as well as gain:
She hurried on. When she got to the kitchen garden she started to run. Oh Kate! She’s not going to tell me. Everything’s changing, everything’s different. She ran for all she was worth down the path and out by the gate into the field. A pheasant burst out from the trees and shuddered into the air, clanking his raucous clockwork of alarm. She ran over the rough damp turf. I’m left behind, but I don’t care. I’ve got plenty to think about too. Everything crowded into her head at once. Timmy, Marigold, Rollo, Nicola, Archie, Peter, Maurice---words, looks, movements---simply extraordinary. Life--- She felt choked. Oh Kate!...
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LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Invitation to the waltz is a very carefully composed "time-piece" which describes life, especially social relations during the second decade of the Twentieth Century.
Very little happens in the book, which is composed of three parts. Part one, describes the homely life of Olivia and her sister Kate
Attending the ball, at which Olivia makes her coming-out party as a débutante, having just reached her seventeenth birthday about a week earlier, the reader is given a glimpse into Edwardian and subsequent decade showing a still very traditional class society. The Curtis sisters belong to the middle to upper middle class, and are clearly not among the most popular guests. Poor Olivia is mostly standing alone or asked to dance by men she would rather shun. The structure of the story resembles the order of dances and engagements to dance as on a dance card, allowing for a moment-by-moment encounter with various attendants to the ball. The characterization of various (young) men and women in this fashion is entertaining, and creates a close-up of a kaleidoscopic picture. Their conversation reveals a great deal about social etiquette and morals at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, such as the following statement: It takes a man to teach a woman how to dress. (p. 199)
Parties being parties, apart from social conventions, quite a number of aspects are remarkably similar to present-day social events, and Invitation to the waltz could be read as a somewhat stiff memory of a school party. Little jealousies, girls trying to get close to the most popular guys, bragging boys, even a social misfit completes the picture.
An interesting read for the contemplative reader with an interest in the first quarter of the previous century.
Very little happens in the book, which is composed of three parts. Part one, describes the homely life of Olivia and her sister Kate
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Curtis, and Olivia's birthday, and her errands in the village to have a dress made. There are various descriptions of her encounter with the common folk in the village they live. The folk from the village are typically weird, the way only British people can be characterized by British novelists.They are just the most lovely, queer creatures. Part two describes the preparations for the ball, and Part three, the longest, describes various characters from the wider vicinity.Attending the ball, at which Olivia makes her coming-out party as a débutante, having just reached her seventeenth birthday about a week earlier, the reader is given a glimpse into Edwardian and subsequent decade showing a still very traditional class society. The Curtis sisters belong to the middle to upper middle class, and are clearly not among the most popular guests. Poor Olivia is mostly standing alone or asked to dance by men she would rather shun. The structure of the story resembles the order of dances and engagements to dance as on a dance card, allowing for a moment-by-moment encounter with various attendants to the ball. The characterization of various (young) men and women in this fashion is entertaining, and creates a close-up of a kaleidoscopic picture. Their conversation reveals a great deal about social etiquette and morals at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, such as the following statement: It takes a man to teach a woman how to dress. (p. 199)
Parties being parties, apart from social conventions, quite a number of aspects are remarkably similar to present-day social events, and Invitation to the waltz could be read as a somewhat stiff memory of a school party. Little jealousies, girls trying to get close to the most popular guys, bragging boys, even a social misfit completes the picture.
An interesting read for the contemplative reader with an interest in the first quarter of the previous century.
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LibraryThing member scohva
The story of Olivia Curtis, who has just turned seventeen, as she experiences her birthday, the preparation for her first dance, and the dance itself. Written in 1932, but taking place somewhat earlier I think (references to the war with fairly young people having suffered injuries), it depicts
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rural English middle class society and how Olivia as a young girl reacts to the people around her. Once the evening of the dance arrives, she is exposed to a greater variety of people than she had ever encountered previously, and the novel ends with her ready to go out and embrace life. Lehmann wrote a sequel which takes place 10 years later, The Weather in the Streets which I would like to find. Very good. Show Less
LibraryThing member Luli81
The introduction of a young lady in the London Society.
And the ending of her innocence and happiness.
And the ending of her innocence and happiness.
LibraryThing member nocto
This kept reminding me of a girls school story. It was written in 1932 and even now I've probably read more school stories from that era than I have adult literature; and the central character is seventeen year old Olivia who is more-or-less the kind of upper middle class nice girl who might have
It was just the same turns of phrase and atmosphere that linked this book to my childhood reading though, this is a more honest look at a young woman. The story revolves around the first dance Olivia attends as an adult - covering the short time frame between sorting out the dress and worrying about being in her elder sister Kate's shadow and a long look at the strange (to both Olivia and I) manners of the dance.
I enjoyed this book in itself, but I'm looking forward to reading the sequel to it, where I believe Olivia is somewhat older and more worldly wise, more.
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turned up at the Chalet School or its ilk.It was just the same turns of phrase and atmosphere that linked this book to my childhood reading though, this is a more honest look at a young woman. The story revolves around the first dance Olivia attends as an adult - covering the short time frame between sorting out the dress and worrying about being in her elder sister Kate's shadow and a long look at the strange (to both Olivia and I) manners of the dance.
I enjoyed this book in itself, but I'm looking forward to reading the sequel to it, where I believe Olivia is somewhat older and more worldly wise, more.
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LibraryThing member Lcanon
I read this book as a teenager, when it seemed sort of dreamy and vague to me, and again as a adult, when I loved it. I think this is the one book where Lehmann gets everything right.
LibraryThing member SandDune
Published in 1932, but set in 1920 just after the First World War, Invitation to the Waltz follows Olivia Curtis, a naïve and inexperienced middle class girl living in a small English village, from her seventeenth birthday to attending her first ever grown-up dance with her sister a week or so
Olivia’s village is not one of the comfortable, reassuring one often found in novels of this period – people are trapped within their circumstances and there’s a real sense of claustrophobia. Miss Robinson, the rather incompetent dressmaker who Olivia feels obliged to patronise for fear of giving offence, has missed her chance of going to London to earn a living as she had wanted to, and trapped by the needs of her family has developed ill health as a way of relieving the boredom of her life. Olivia’s father, who likes music and travel and reading books in French and German, has spent his life as owner and manager of a paper mill. It’s clear that Olivia too, isn’t really suited to the world in which she finds herself – only her sister Kate seems to truly fit.
The class structure of the time is also vividly portrayed. Olivia and Kate are daughters of a local businessman, but it’s clear that the family is not as prosperous as it had been. While they are friends with Marigold, in whose honour the dance is being held, Olivia and her sister are very conscious that once she has left school behind Marigold is going to be moving in a wealthier world which they can’t aspire to. Miss Robinson too has her already limited social world limited by considerations of class: she can talk to one neighbour who was the wife of a market gardener but not to the other who was the wife of a bricklayer.
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later. Part one follows Olivia on her birthday to a visit to the dressmaker; part two chronicles the arrival of the somewhat disappointing partner acquired by Mrs Curtis to accompany her daughters; and part three describes the dance itself. Nothing much happens. But what the author does beautifully is show Olivia’s navigation through the minefield of class consciousness and manners that rules her small world. The agony of not knowing what to do in a social situation (especially when you’d been brought up to be polite at all costs), of not fitting in, of knowing that your clothes aren’t right, is vividly brought home. The world in which Olivia lived has completely vanished but that feeling of awkwardness (albeit in different circumstances) could apply equally today. Olivia’s village is not one of the comfortable, reassuring one often found in novels of this period – people are trapped within their circumstances and there’s a real sense of claustrophobia. Miss Robinson, the rather incompetent dressmaker who Olivia feels obliged to patronise for fear of giving offence, has missed her chance of going to London to earn a living as she had wanted to, and trapped by the needs of her family has developed ill health as a way of relieving the boredom of her life. Olivia’s father, who likes music and travel and reading books in French and German, has spent his life as owner and manager of a paper mill. It’s clear that Olivia too, isn’t really suited to the world in which she finds herself – only her sister Kate seems to truly fit.
The class structure of the time is also vividly portrayed. Olivia and Kate are daughters of a local businessman, but it’s clear that the family is not as prosperous as it had been. While they are friends with Marigold, in whose honour the dance is being held, Olivia and her sister are very conscious that once she has left school behind Marigold is going to be moving in a wealthier world which they can’t aspire to. Miss Robinson too has her already limited social world limited by considerations of class: she can talk to one neighbour who was the wife of a market gardener but not to the other who was the wife of a bricklayer.
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LibraryThing member Bagpuss
Invitation to the Waltz is a gentle coming-of-age novel, set in the 1920s, about a young girl called Olivia who has been invited to her first ball just after her seventeenth birthday. Neither she nor her sister, Kate, is worldly-wise and both worry that they will be wallflowers – left standing at
I enjoy social commentary books – most of those I’ve read have been about people from the lower end of the social scale from Olivia and Kate – people whose lives are lived in abject poverty. Olivia’s life is different. Although the family aren’t as well-off since their father returned from the First World War, their slightly reduced circumstances simply mean that Kate has had to give up horse riding lessons! Despite the very different social scale I did enjoy the class aspect of this book. It’s difficult to imagine today going to a dance and having to have an invitation card with you and to wait for someone to fill in a vacant slot!
I’m not sure who I’d recommend this book to – it’s a very gentle story and I enjoyed the characterisation but some might feel the story unsatisfactory but I enjoyed it despite the slow pace – I think Lehmann’s characters are all believable and enjoyable and Rosamond Lehmann is an author whom I will definitely try again and I will definitely be reading the sequel. The Weather in the Streets.
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the side of the room, hoping that at least some of the slots on their invitation cards might be filled in. They had invited their mother’s Godson so that they would have someone to dance with but he doesn’t turn out to be the godsend they’d hoped for. As the evening wears on, Kate finds her dance card full and so Olivia is left somewhat to her own devices and, as the evening wears on, she dances with all kinds of different people and tries her best to enjoy her first proper evening out.I enjoy social commentary books – most of those I’ve read have been about people from the lower end of the social scale from Olivia and Kate – people whose lives are lived in abject poverty. Olivia’s life is different. Although the family aren’t as well-off since their father returned from the First World War, their slightly reduced circumstances simply mean that Kate has had to give up horse riding lessons! Despite the very different social scale I did enjoy the class aspect of this book. It’s difficult to imagine today going to a dance and having to have an invitation card with you and to wait for someone to fill in a vacant slot!
I’m not sure who I’d recommend this book to – it’s a very gentle story and I enjoyed the characterisation but some might feel the story unsatisfactory but I enjoyed it despite the slow pace – I think Lehmann’s characters are all believable and enjoyable and Rosamond Lehmann is an author whom I will definitely try again and I will definitely be reading the sequel. The Weather in the Streets.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
I probably would have liked this more if I had read it first as an adolescent.
LibraryThing member brenzi
It’s the 1920s and Olivia Curtis is a shy seventeen year old who is going to her first dance. She’s lived a sheltered life and knows with a fair amount of certainty that she will be overshadowed by her older and more attractive sister. But she is looking forward to this opportunity to spread
The night presents a mixed bag of results for her and the emotional roller coaster she has been on throughout the night culminates in two significant events that change Olivia in ways she had never anticipated and she begins to gather her emotions when she realizes that she was not prepared for the most important events of the night. This was a pretty straight forward coming of age story until she realizes the importance of the two events and that is what made this book so much more than that.
The writing itself was unlike any I’ve read recently. Lehmann would drastically change gears from short, static sentences to lovely constructions of nearly poetic prose. She describes the appearance of Olivia’s brother James along with Miss Mivart, returning from their nature walk in this way:
”Beside him stalked Miss Mivart, gaunt, refined in black velvet toque, astrakhan bolero, voluminous claret-colored skirt trimmed with rows of black braid, black galoshes: fantastic garb, persisting year in, year out, through summer heat and winter cold, proclaiming her status of gentlewoman in reduced circumstances as unmistakably as did her nose the chronic nature of her dyspepsia. Poor Miss Mivart; but poorer James, wretched little sacrifice!...incongruous pair yoked together by Mother’s implacable benevolence. For Miss Mivart and her friend Miss Toomer, relics cast up none knew whence, united none knew why---(by some past similar chronicle, one surmised, of drab reversal and disappointment, investments mismanaged, confidence misplaced, schemes miscarried, strokes, creeping deaths by cancer, drain of savings)---dwelt together in a cottage on the green, and eked out a totally inadequate income in various painful and ladylike ways.”
I just love that passage. Could it be more ironically descriptive? I don’t think so. Highly recommended.
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her wings and just maybe enjoy herself.The night presents a mixed bag of results for her and the emotional roller coaster she has been on throughout the night culminates in two significant events that change Olivia in ways she had never anticipated and she begins to gather her emotions when she realizes that she was not prepared for the most important events of the night. This was a pretty straight forward coming of age story until she realizes the importance of the two events and that is what made this book so much more than that.
The writing itself was unlike any I’ve read recently. Lehmann would drastically change gears from short, static sentences to lovely constructions of nearly poetic prose. She describes the appearance of Olivia’s brother James along with Miss Mivart, returning from their nature walk in this way:
”Beside him stalked Miss Mivart, gaunt, refined in black velvet toque, astrakhan bolero, voluminous claret-colored skirt trimmed with rows of black braid, black galoshes: fantastic garb, persisting year in, year out, through summer heat and winter cold, proclaiming her status of gentlewoman in reduced circumstances as unmistakably as did her nose the chronic nature of her dyspepsia. Poor Miss Mivart; but poorer James, wretched little sacrifice!...incongruous pair yoked together by Mother’s implacable benevolence. For Miss Mivart and her friend Miss Toomer, relics cast up none knew whence, united none knew why---(by some past similar chronicle, one surmised, of drab reversal and disappointment, investments mismanaged, confidence misplaced, schemes miscarried, strokes, creeping deaths by cancer, drain of savings)---dwelt together in a cottage on the green, and eked out a totally inadequate income in various painful and ladylike ways.”
I just love that passage. Could it be more ironically descriptive? I don’t think so. Highly recommended.
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