I've finally read Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann. Love her more and more with each read. She's an exceptional writer, her use of free indirect speech is superbly evocative, her world rich and her depictions read like poetry. I love her characters, there's such an eagerness about them. Rosamond Lehmann is brilliant, I want to live in her books. I can't believe I've already read three of her novels, I feel so lucky they're still in print. The foreword of the Virago edition, written by her Roland Phillips, Lehmann's grandson, sums up the book as "being inside the mind of a teenage girl going to a dance". She's very special in that way, I've never read somebody who can produce such a warm and intimate narrative, full of details that break your heart or make you eager to read pages aloud to feel the flow once more. For me, she's the writer of sweet agonies, of, as Janet Watts puts it, "the delight of being alive".
Here is a quote from the book, which I think represents it very well:

She saw the glinting stream running between the garden and the park. The spaces of sky and lawn were broad and peaceful. Trees, water, moonlight made up their own cold world, unalterable, infinitely detached from humanity. It was like dying for a bit to be out here...

Not much happens in this book, but then nothing is really supposed to happen: it's just a snapshot of a moment in the life of a young girl who was living at a time of immense social change in Britain, one of the last generation of upper-middle-class girls who would be educated at home by a governess, have a brief coming out season, and then be married off to a nice young man. Very light and charming, a quick and pleasurable read. ( )

If ever a book was a period piece, this is. It is a snapshot of English upper middle-class life between the wars, when girls were still educated at home in a schoolroom by governesses, and the only future they were expected to have was marriage. It depicts a period of innocence of experience that has been lost to young women. Not that that is a bad thing in itself. The story is of two sisters, daughters of a prosperous household in England in 1920, and the week of their lives leading up to and during a 'coming-out' dance given by an aristocratic neighbour. Olivia has to nerve herself to attend this event and suffers agonies of apprehension and shyness, her dress is all wrong, she can't seem to manage small talk, and the whole evening is a mix of enjoyment and terror for her. We have all had a time in our lives when we had to suffer the frantic inward misery of initiation into a new situation, and in that respect this book will always chime with the reader, reminding them of what it is like to be an adolescent. I first read this as a teenager myself and absolutely adored it, and Lehmann's other book "Dusty Answer", and it is as fresh today as when I first read it, indeed as fresh as when it was written nearly 75 years ago. ( )