After their somewhat hostile reception of Rosamond Lehmann’s second novel,
A Note in Music(1930), many contemporary critics assumed that the author had subsequently made a conscious decision to return in her third novel to the subject-matter of her first great success,
Dusty Answer(1927).
Invitation to the Waltz(1932) was much praised as a study of adolescence, of the undramatic end of an innocent, happy childhood, and of the dawning of awareness of the onset of adult life. The action of the novel spans a week which begins with Olivia Curtis’s seventeenth birthday and ends the morning after her first grown-up dance. However, Lehmann had originally intended this to be the prologue of a long novel, following Olivia into a disillusioned womanhood; it was only when the first section…
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Citation: Pollard, Wendy. "Invitation to the Waltz". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 February 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4397, accessed 26 November 2024.]
