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About
Judith Earle grows up watching the house next door, waiting for the children who come and go there each summer: Roddy, golden and unreachable; Julian, brilliant and cruel to himself before he is cruel to anyone else; steady, devoted Martin; lovely, lost Mariella. She loves them all long before she understands what loving means.
At Cambridge, everything changes. Jennifer Baird walks into her life and fills it entirely - the bathing in the river, the nights talking until dawn, a happiness so complete that nothing before it seems to have counted. Then Jennifer is drawn away by someone else, and Judith is left to carry what she felt back into a world that has no use for it.
What follows is Judith's slow, aching negotiation with desire itself: with Roddy, who wants her only for a night; with Julian, who wants her more than she can return; with the girl she has lost and cannot stop loving. Rosamond Lehmann, twenty-six when the novel appeared in 1927, writes all of it - the longing for Jennifer, the longing for Roddy, the whole unruly want of a young woman becoming herself - with the same fearless, unclassifying tenderness.
Dusty Answer is a novel about what it costs to feel everything at once, and what is left when the feeling has passed.
At Cambridge, everything changes. Jennifer Baird walks into her life and fills it entirely - the bathing in the river, the nights talking until dawn, a happiness so complete that nothing before it seems to have counted. Then Jennifer is drawn away by someone else, and Judith is left to carry what she felt back into a world that has no use for it.
What follows is Judith's slow, aching negotiation with desire itself: with Roddy, who wants her only for a night; with Julian, who wants her more than she can return; with the girl she has lost and cannot stop loving. Rosamond Lehmann, twenty-six when the novel appeared in 1927, writes all of it - the longing for Jennifer, the longing for Roddy, the whole unruly want of a young woman becoming herself - with the same fearless, unclassifying tenderness.
Dusty Answer is a novel about what it costs to feel everything at once, and what is left when the feeling has passed.