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 …
731 words
Citation: Pollard, Wendy. "Invitation to the Waltz". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 February 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4397, accessed 25 November 2024.]