The Ballad and the Source

Fülszöveg

The Ballad and the Source
' The book alternates between the calm of life remembered and the gale of life imagined. For gradually a vast history of passion and wickedness and madness is confided to the child, who listens inquisitive and enraptured, as if to Cinderella or Sindhad. I must applaud the gusto with which the author has resumed a main tradition of the nineteenth century English novel. That the pictures of Edwardian childhood enchant goes without saying. We all know Miss Lehmann's gift for the elegiac evocation of a countryside as it occupies the sense and imagination of the young. Her accomplishment moreover, in characterising by the plausible turn of phrase is in the best sense professional. Her ear is no less exact than her eye. But it is the contempt for all modern inhibitions that I specially admire, the impetus with which she models the over life-size figure of Mrs. Jardine, so splendid as she appears to herself, so infamous as she is to others, absolute in... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Ballad and the Source
' The book alternates between the calm of life remembered and the gale of life imagined. For gradually a vast history of passion and wickedness and madness is confided to the child, who listens inquisitive and enraptured, as if to Cinderella or Sindhad. I must applaud the gusto with which the author has resumed a main tradition of the nineteenth century English novel. That the pictures of Edwardian childhood enchant goes without saying. We all know Miss Lehmann's gift for the elegiac evocation of a countryside as it occupies the sense and imagination of the young. Her accomplishment moreover, in characterising by the plausible turn of phrase is in the best sense professional. Her ear is no less exact than her eye. But it is the contempt for all modern inhibitions that I specially admire, the impetus with which she models the over life-size figure of Mrs. Jardine, so splendid as she appears to herself, so infamous as she is to others, absolute in self-justification, enveloping all aroimd her in calamity. In this novel the gifts of Alain-Fournier and Miss Braddon are strangely intermingled. It is as if the war had driven the novelist back into the fervid world of a child's imagination; and how thankful one is to escape with her from the dingy interiors and cabbage-water smells now fashionable into chateaux and lime avenues where beautiful creatures in bright velvets parade their exorbitant personalities. I cannot doubt that this is Miss Lehmann's best and most permanent book.'
Raymond Mortimer in
The New Statesman Vissza