#ANote_2025 Tomorrow's the last day of the slow read of Rosamond Lehmann's A Note in Music (1930)! Message me if you'd like to chat over zoom one of these weekends. @karinj.bsky.social @nemimeli.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social @joiedevivre9.bsky.social @jacquiwine.bsky.social & other Lehmann fans!
1. "Secret thinking's as bad as secret drinking. It makes one a living falsehood." - Norah
2. "Have I ever been necessary to you--ever?"
3. "I fell just a little in love with her. . . . There was nothing in my letters that was yours, Norah. No disloyalty." - Gerald
#ANote_2025 #Lehmann Day 28
"'As long as I'm alive I shall think of you somewhere in the world, still gay and lucky ... so you must promise me you'll be so always.'"
. . . He was armoured now in her love."
"I can stand ANYTHING. I'm very tough."
#ANote_2025 #Lehmann Day 25, end of Part vi. #Grace
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The fact that BOTH young men in this novel know Oliver is oddly reminiscent of Anthony Powell. And we find Mary (the mistress of the manor) knew Hugh's father. These insulated groups are baffling to me.
"He stood at thee entrance of the tent, staring upwards at a sky full of stars. Funny thing : he had not noticed stars for years ; had forgotten what a lot there were, and how they shone." 220
Part v #ANote_2025 #Lehmann Tom has a contemplative side, when alone and lonely. #Stars
#ANote_2025 Day 22, 9/22- p.207 "The orchestra" to 217 "open them." (br)
"Never, he thought, had he known anyone to take her pleasures so seriously, have so little sense of humour." 215 Part v. When one has little, one takes that little "so seriously," yes.
I've caught up and gone a little ahead, but who can blame me when the carnival is going on? I got swept up in the sights and sounds!
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"Time was not real, except as one made it so. Why not bind it to one's purpose, make it servant instead of master? It should be a simple matter to abolish ten years of nothingness..." p165
John Donne making the sun run... all seems possible until your knees and hips tell you otherwise.
Today's pages about Tom's appreciation of his contemplative, quiet wife & his attempts to cavort about while she writes away somewhere (a month already- long holiday- lucky her!) Can't change his stripes, so to speak. "His frame of mind had been all wrong."
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The hollyhocks - 'she fancied that their round heads were notes of music...chords and scales...'
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Part V Grace goes on holiday somewhere, where she hears 'warning notes of a new order', rattles & roars not yet disturbing the 'one common harmony of the fruitful earth'. A beautiful passage where Grace saves the baby bird, sheltering it in her hand as she shelters Hugh in her mind.
"Something might be made of that, in an irregular, wandering rhythmical pattern. This might be the line to pursue: to see one reality and turn it inside out again and again, making of one many, and all conflicting; and ending with a question mark...." 153 #ANote_2025 #Lehmann The writer
(1/2)
"...surprise and contrast, of going alone, in unsuspected isolation, on one's way; and worse, a comfortless suggestion that the way--life, in fact--is without continuity."
Lehmann seems almost antithetical to Anthony Powell.
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P76-77 "It does not ease the burden of the past to share in recollections; for with each plunge into it, each withdrawl, something is left behind that weighs more heavily than the memory; something that can never be shared or imparted--a sense of accumulating unease..." #ANote_2025
Starting at Part V, the page numbers don't match my volume, and I tried to find the spots, but to no avail. So, I'll read about ten pages a day. #ANote_2025
And ever since he had tried to do her down.
She stopped, and said aloud: 'Why should I live with my enemy?'
144 Part iv #ANote_2025 #Lehmann The mutual need (and physical attraction?) decays into thinly-coated hostility and resentment. (How bold to write these words in 1930!!)
"'Some gardens give you a special feeling. It's when they are made by people who--...who have a sort of affinity--.... Or it's the difference between a work of art and a clever exercise. You can tell at once.'" 133
Part iv #ANote_2025 Day 14 #Grace #Sussex
Lots of gorgeous descriptive passages in this novel. I love how several chapters start with an overview of the relevant season as we move through the year. #ANote_2025
A NOTE IN MUSIC by Rosamond Lehmann
“The lake was girdled with trees and bushes, and wild song welled out as if from the throats of hundreds and hundreds of choral branches. The unfolding leaves covered the boughs […] some were tinged with a russet flame, haunting the eye with an autumnal prophecy.”🍁🍂 #ANote_2025
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'caught in a general tangle of surprises' - the garden, the people in it, their thoughts & feelings. Grace admires the Hugh she sees, 'clear & unambiguous, & not as most people were'. Class comes back, & an implicit comparison between Grace & Pansy, both lower classes than Hugh.
Cover of my VMC edition showing an artwork of a woman’s bust and some flowers.
“He was in his knotted mood because…probably because she had stayed out longer than he expected; because he knew he would not give as good a lecture as he wished to; because the boys had had buttery fingers at tea…something of that sort." #ANote_2025 💙📚
jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/a...
"And the weather, the blessing of the sun, had worked as a kind of charm perhaps" 110
Part iii #ANote_2025 #Lehmann
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I find Pansy the most sympathetic character in this tale of middle classness.
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The dancing place has 'a kind of hypocrtiical decorum, a furtiveness suggesting the repressed and dismal lasciviousness of British non-conformist imaginations.'
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'the passers-by stared...stared...with the bulging uncompromising stare of the north'.
The North & South are still different. Now we think of the North being friendlier, probably more conventional? Arguably the North & South are both uncompromising, the North a little arrogant.
"They never grew to know each other any better, he might have said, had the possibility of a progressive relationship ever struck him. He knew enough about her." 104
Piii #ANote_2025 #Lehmann #Siblings secure in their long-standing relationship with each other- no need to worry about the other.
HEIMWEH is homesickness in German.
Reminded of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage & English cultural ties/admiration of the principalities that were united into the German Empire in 1871. The latter's rapidly growing naval prowess strained this relationship too.
Piii #ANote_2025 #PilgrimageTogether
