Invitation to the Waltz

An enthusiastic 4.5 stars! Invitation to the Waltz is a 1932 novel that feels like a cross between Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton and a Jane Austen novel. It revolves around sisters Olivia and Kate, who are preparing to go to Olivia’s first dance, where they encounter a revolving door of every awful (and wonderful) type of boy you might meet at a dance.

Invitation to the Waltz was hilarious at times (Simpkin the Pekinese dog was the absolute highlight of this for me). Throughout the book, I loved the use of over the top language which perfectly captures the life or death, dramatic nature of adolescent communication and feelings.

It struck me while reading just how relatable I found this even though it was published in 1932. show more Olivia’s thoughts, expectations and fears were very similar to my own as a teenager. Lehmann writes so many different kinds of characters, and they all felt incredibly real to me. I realized afterwards that I could remember each individual character and practically everything about them, even ones that were only present for a little in the story, which is a testament to how good Lehmann is at writing memorable characters!

The story ends abruptly, leaving things feeling a little unresolved, which kept it from being a full 5 star read. But the journey is worth it, so I highly recommend picking this one up!

Who will like Invitation to the Walz:
- If you're the sort of person who gets a kick out of using complex vocabulary words for dramatic emphasis
- If you’ve ever been to a dance in your youth with all manner of odious boys crawling out of the woodwork and immediately wished to crawl back into the woodwork to escape them
- If you love the vastly underrated novel Guard Your Daughters
- If you tend to choose characters over plot

Apparently the audiobook version loses the humor a bit, because it’s narrated in such a straightforward way, so I’d recommend the physical version to get the most out of it! The audiobook is still good, just less funny. show less

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 show more 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. show less

It’s the 1920s and Olivia Curtis is a shy seventeen year old who is going to her first dance. She’s lived a sheltered life and knows with a fair amount of certainty that she will be overshadowed by her older and more attractive sister. But she is looking forward to this opportunity to spread her wings and just maybe enjoy herself.

The night presents a mixed bag of results for her and the emotional roller coaster she has been on throughout the night culminates in two significant events that change Olivia in ways she had never anticipated and she begins to gather her emotions when she realizes that she was not prepared for the most important events of the night. This was a pretty straight forward coming of age story until she realizes show more the importance of the two events and that is what made this book so much more than that.

The writing itself was unlike any I’ve read recently. Lehmann would drastically change gears from short, static sentences to lovely constructions of nearly poetic prose. She describes the appearance of Olivia’s brother James along with Miss Mivart, returning from their nature walk in this way:

”Beside him stalked Miss Mivart, gaunt, refined in black velvet toque, astrakhan bolero, voluminous claret-colored skirt trimmed with rows of black braid, black galoshes: fantastic garb, persisting year in, year out, through summer heat and winter cold, proclaiming her status of gentlewoman in reduced circumstances as unmistakably as did her nose the chronic nature of her dyspepsia. Poor Miss Mivart; but poorer James, wretched little sacrifice!...incongruous pair yoked together by Mother’s implacable benevolence. For Miss Mivart and her friend Miss Toomer, relics cast up none knew whence, united none knew why---(by some past similar chronicle, one surmised, of drab reversal and disappointment, investments mismanaged, confidence misplaced, schemes miscarried, strokes, creeping deaths by cancer, drain of savings)---dwelt together in a cottage on the green, and eked out a totally inadequate income in various painful and ladylike ways.”

I just love that passage. Could it be more ironically descriptive? I don’t think so. Highly recommended. show less

Published in 1932, but set in 1920 just after the First World War, Invitation to the Waltz follows Olivia Curtis, a naïve and inexperienced middle class girl living in a small English village, from her seventeenth birthday to attending her first ever grown-up dance with her sister a week or so later. Part one follows Olivia on her birthday to a visit to the dressmaker; part two chronicles the arrival of the somewhat disappointing partner acquired by Mrs Curtis to accompany her daughters; and part three describes the dance itself. Nothing much happens. But what the author does beautifully is show Olivia’s navigation through the minefield of class consciousness and manners that rules her small world. The agony of not knowing what to do show more in a social situation (especially when you’d been brought up to be polite at all costs), of not fitting in, of knowing that your clothes aren’t right, is vividly brought home. The world in which Olivia lived has completely vanished but that feeling of awkwardness (albeit in different circumstances) could apply equally today.

Olivia’s village is not one of the comfortable, reassuring one often found in novels of this period – people are trapped within their circumstances and there’s a real sense of claustrophobia. Miss Robinson, the rather incompetent dressmaker who Olivia feels obliged to patronise for fear of giving offence, has missed her chance of going to London to earn a living as she had wanted to, and trapped by the needs of her family has developed ill health as a way of relieving the boredom of her life. Olivia’s father, who likes music and travel and reading books in French and German, has spent his life as owner and manager of a paper mill. It’s clear that Olivia too, isn’t really suited to the world in which she finds herself – only her sister Kate seems to truly fit.

The class structure of the time is also vividly portrayed. Olivia and Kate are daughters of a local businessman, but it’s clear that the family is not as prosperous as it had been. While they are friends with Marigold, in whose honour the dance is being held, Olivia and her sister are very conscious that once she has left school behind Marigold is going to be moving in a wealthier world which they can’t aspire to. Miss Robinson too has her already limited social world limited by considerations of class: she can talk to one neighbour who was the wife of a market gardener but not to the other who was the wife of a bricklayer. show less

A touching ode to that ephemeral period when the last vestiges of childhood naivety is exposed to and extinguished by the complicated multitudes of adulthood. If you've ever been young and self-conscious at a party (and want to recapture that feeling for some reason), this is the book for you.

Period note: I have not frequently encountered in fiction this type of British gentry, the daughter too "well-brought up" a lady to work but also not rich enough to truly be a lady of leisure of the time. This dichotomous dilemma and the country life revolving around the main landed gentry in the area, reminded me of Molly in Wives and Daughters.

Reading note: I tried to read this book about a year ago. That ?Virago edition went straight into the show more Olivia wake-up scene and my mind fritzed out. However, this penguin edition had an opening chapter that contextualised the setting which drew me in. show less

I seem be using the phrase “deceptively simple” a lot about my recent Virago reading. Certainly, upon the surface Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation To The Waltz could hardly be simpler: Olivia Curtis, a middle-class girl living in an English village in 1920, turns seventeen, gets a new dress, and attends her first adult party. However, this outline gives no hint of the sureness of Lehmann’s writing nor the clarity of her vision.

After briefly skittering around amongst the other members of the Curtis family, particularly the slightly older but considerably more poised sister, Kate, Lehmann settles down more or less permanently in Olivia’s consciousness as she travels towards a watershed in her life. Lehmann’s writing is warmed by show more her affectionate understanding of her heroine, teetering between the rituals and habits of childhood and a new and somewhat frightening life as an almost-woman. We follow Olivia through the week leading up to the party, the usual banal routine excitingly broken up by the new experiences of preparation; and the character of our heroine, or the lack thereof, is made amusingly plain via her inability to take a firm line with Miss Robinson, the neuralgic village dressmaker, whose skills unfortunately do not include a knack for accurate cutting, and in an encounter with a door-to-door lace-seller, who sums up her reluctant customer with devastating accuracy and eventually departs with the entirety of her slender finances.

The narrative stays predominantly within Olivia’s rather limited perception, with the result that those moments when we step outside it into a wider, deeper vision of the world around her are both startling and moving. As Olivia and Miss Robinson contemplate the flame-coloured silk which is to be the party dress, we are given a sudden glimpse into the latter’s suffocatingly narrow existence and thwarted dreams:

That was after the death of Mr Robinson, an able cheerful man---manager of a department in the mills, churchwarden, clerk to the Parish Council. Though Connie said We must all look after Mother now, and Gertie under emotional stress lost what little head she had and needed special care, and Mother said I need all my dear daughters around me now, God willing we shall never part in this life, I feel it won’t be long before I too Go Home---in spite of all this, she would---almost---have gone, and been the selfish one, the undutiful, the heartbreaker; and never come back to little Compton again. But of course she hadn’t done it. She didn’t even know that she disliked her mother. Enmeshed in those collapsible leather tentacles, she felt comfortable, developed poor health, had nerves; went out only on Wednesday afternoons...

The party for which Olivia and Kate are preparing is the “coming out” of Marigold Spencer, the daughter of the most prominent family in the neighbourhood. In their early lives, the Curtises and the Spencers were schooled and played together, but as young adults the class gap is beginning to make itself felt. The Curtis girls are no more than fringe-dwellers, lookers-on at the mysterious and glamorous world of house-parties, trips to London, fast cars and an almost religious devotion to sporting pursuits, as represented by the Spencers. Even for Kate, for whom the party will turn out to be almost literally a dream come true, the potential for mishap seems limitless. For Olivia, less attractive and less socially skilled than her sister, acutely self-conscious in her ill-cut dress, the party becomes a nightmare of pain spiked by occasional and generally unanticipated pleasure. Here, too, Rosamond Lehmann remains within Olivia’s bewildered consciousness, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about Cousin Etty’s adventures in London, about the defiantly maladjusted Peter Jenkins, and about the intimidating Lady Spencer, who suddenly, startlingly, lets her hair down.

In retreat from the shattering disillusionment of an encounter with her childhood sweetheart, Olivia is soothed by a moment of fellowship with Sir John Spencer – who she finds hiding from his own party in the library – and the son of the house, Rollo. For most readers, I imagine, Olivia’s passion for literature will be her most attractive characteristic. The early part of the novel finds her “in a trance of voluptuous anguish”, weeping copiously over her umpteenth reading of David Copperfield (“Enjoying yourself?” inquires Kate wryly – to which the answer is, of course, yes); while in perhaps her first truly comfortable moment at the party, she rattles off to Rollo a list of her favourite authors: the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen...although not Scott. And never, I think, is Olivia more sympathetic than in her unspoken response to the question of why she didn’t show up for a Girl Guides meeting:

“Olivia, you slacker, why didn’t you turn up at Guides last week?”
Why not say: Because I preferred to spend the afternoon on the schoolroom sofa reading East Lynne and eating nut-milk chocolate...because I loathe the beastly Guides.
“I had such an awful cold...”

As a new day dawns on the Curtis sisters in the wake of the party, nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. It is not the party itself but its repercussions that force Olivia out of the cocoon of her childhood and into the adult world, to the unwilling realisation that growing up means loss as well as gain:

She hurried on. When she got to the kitchen garden she started to run. Oh Kate! She’s not going to tell me. Everything’s changing, everything’s different. She ran for all she was worth down the path and out by the gate into the field. A pheasant burst out from the trees and shuddered into the air, clanking his raucous clockwork of alarm. She ran over the rough damp turf. I’m left behind, but I don’t care. I’ve got plenty to think about too. Everything crowded into her head at once. Timmy, Marigold, Rollo, Nicola, Archie, Peter, Maurice---words, looks, movements---simply extraordinary. Life--- She felt choked. Oh Kate!... show less

Upon first reading Invitation to the Waltz I thought it was a lively charming novel, which it is. This re-read of it however, has given me the chance to appreciate just how very good it is. First published in 1932, but set around 1920 Invitation to the Waltz is the story of a dance, seventeen year old Olivia's first ever, which she will attend with her beautiful older sister Kate. On the surface there isn’t much to the story at all. Olivia wakes to her seventeenth birthday, is given some marvellous scarlet fabric to have a dress made for the coming ball, a ten shilling note, a diary and an ugly ornament from her sweet little brother. Then there are the days leading up to the dance, the dress which must be made and the anticipated show more arrival of Reggie who will accompany them to the dance, and provide a possibly much needed partner for Olivia. Olivia and Kate's family comprises a socially aware mother an elderly father, odd Uncle Oswald, and endearingly sweet 7-year-old brother James. Olivia is a wonderful character – brought up to be polite, she is terrified of hurting people’s feeling, she is so overly conscious of herself as we so often are at that age – that her trials and agonies could belong to almost any young girl – even today.

“I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait...”

Then comes the evening of the party and the awful, exciting anticipation, of a longed for event. The flame coloured fabric that Olivia is given for her birthday has been made into a dress by local seamstress Miss Robinson, another wonderful creation from Rosamond Lehmann, as we are allowed a poignant glimpse of this sad woman’s life, her disappointments and inadequacies. The dress surprisingly not tried on in its finished form until the evening itself is inevitably a disappointment. The evening of the dance takes up three-quarters of the book with the people Olivia and Kate meet - especially Olivia, the conversations they have, and the feelings they awake in her. Olivia meets some interesting characters at the dance – a young blind man, a rather miserable poet as well as the son of the household Rollo Spencer.

“I’ve had a lot really, one way and another. What was it that, at last, had made almost a richness? Curious fragments odd and ends of looks, speeches…Nothing for myself really. Rollo leaving me to go to Nicola. Rollo and his father smiling at one another. Peter crying, saying “are you my friend?” Kate looking so happy…Waltzing with Timmy. Marigold flying downstairs to him. Yes, I can say I’ve enjoyed myself.”

The dance held for the effervescent Marigold Spencer – is both an excitement and an agony for Kate and Olivia. They just daughters of a middle-class businessman, while aristocratic Marigold and Rollo Spencer are from an altogether different world. A world of glamour, house parties, trips to London, fast cars and hunting. As they leave childhood behind them, they will inevitably become more separate from the glorious beings from the big house who they were once more equal to, as children. Rosamond Lehmann portrays the differences of class, and social position brilliantly in this novel. From the sad thirty-year-old dressmaker, aware she was too good to marry a bricklayer, left on the shelf and reduced to a life of tedium and ill health. To the sweep’s bedraggled little children, to the selfish, vain young things who arrive for the party, she has a brilliantly observing eye. show less