The Echoing Grove
by Rosamond Lehmann
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Two sisters: Madeleine and Dinah. One husband: Rickie Masters. For many years now, Dinah, exotic and sensual, has conducted a clandestine affair with Rickie. Madeleine, calm and resolute, has accepted that her marriage has been of limited success. Rickie's sudden death makes widows of both sisters in this highly imaginative novel that explores with extraordinary insight the sublimity, the rivalry and the pain of personal relationships. 'She makes a mood, an atmosphere, which is never show more forgotten . . . The inner voice of women talking to themselves about their love affairs, knowing that it is hopeless, having to go ahead anyway, expecting the end as soon as it begins. That, of course, is what Rosamond Lehmann does best' Sunday Times show lessTags
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The Echoing Grove is not an easy read. The two main characters are difficult to like, flawed, uncomfortable... they are two sisters who were in love with the same man, now dead. While Madeleine was married to Ricky, Dinah had an affair with him which led to her pregnancy. The resulting still-birth precipitates a crisis which transforms their already distant relationship into estrangement. Now, briefly reunited after their mother's funeral, they remember the past and its pain.
It's not only the subject and characters which make it heavy going - the novel's structure reflects their turmoil as, in adjacent rooms for the first time in many years, they succumb to memories of a past they've each tried to evade, Dinah in her busy life, show more Madeleine in her garden.
What struck me most, re-reading this novel decades after I first discovered Lehmann, is the delicacy with which such raw emotions are described. Pain is exquisitely - almost sadistically - delineated, while the reader is constantly kept off-balance by the shifting timelines and unattributed points of view.
All Lehmann's writing stays with me, years after reading, but this haunting book, even if it's one of her best, is ultimately too grief-laden to be satisfying. Admirable, but not enjoyable.
My copy was courtesy of NetGalley. show less
It's not only the subject and characters which make it heavy going - the novel's structure reflects their turmoil as, in adjacent rooms for the first time in many years, they succumb to memories of a past they've each tried to evade, Dinah in her busy life, show more Madeleine in her garden.
What struck me most, re-reading this novel decades after I first discovered Lehmann, is the delicacy with which such raw emotions are described. Pain is exquisitely - almost sadistically - delineated, while the reader is constantly kept off-balance by the shifting timelines and unattributed points of view.
All Lehmann's writing stays with me, years after reading, but this haunting book, even if it's one of her best, is ultimately too grief-laden to be satisfying. Admirable, but not enjoyable.
My copy was courtesy of NetGalley. show less
I love this book, though I find it heartbreaking and devastating, too. I have, however, taken away from it the idea that somehow love echoes on: the strength of the emotion reverberates long after the affair seems to be over.
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The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read
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Author Information
24+ Works 3,104 Members
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Echoing Grove
- Original title
- The Echoing Grove
- Original publication date
- 1953
- People/Characters
- Rickie Masters; Madeleine Masters; Dinah Burkett
- Related movies
- The Heart of Me (2002 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For
My Mother and My Father - First words
- Directly Madeleine came to the door, Dinah said, without looking at her: "You've got the blue tubs".
The Echoing Grove, first published in 1953, completes and closes the cycle of novels Rosamond Lehmann had begun twenty-six years earlier with Dusty Answer. (Introduction) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)She closed her fingers over them, letting them slide into the hollow of her palm, feeling them nudge lightly, settle there; anonymous abstraction: questionable solid; cold, almost weightless weight.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Rosamond Lehmann was already looking forward, here, to the beliefs which would become so important to her in the last years of her life; and it's this tremulous, barely voiced undercurrent which sets The Echoing Grove apart from her other novels and makes of it - like Four Quartets themselves - something 'sublime, unhopeful and consoling'. (Introduction) - Blurbers
- Drabble, Margaret; Raven, Simon
- Original language
- English
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 359
- Popularity
- 87,378
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.55)
- Languages
- English, French, German, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 21
- ASINs
- 9
