Rosamond Lehmann; Author of Love Stories

Rosamond Lehmann, a writer of grace and sensibility whose novels of feminine turmoil were cherished by three generations of readers, is dead.

A spokesman for her family told the Associated Press she had died Monday at her London home at age 89. No cause was given.

Since her first novel “Dusty Answer” was published in 1927 she had enjoyed a success limited to few writers of fiction.

Her stories of women in love--of “the chase, the war that brings nothing about”--struck a responsive chord throughout the English-speaking world.

“Dusty Answer,” about a young girl growing to maturity, was praised for its style as well as its insight into the mind of a sensitive adolescent moving toward adulthood in an academic environment.

She enjoyed the rare distinction of producing novels of literary merit that also managed to become best sellers. And she did it for 60 years. “Dusty Answer,” for example, was reprinted as recently as 1978 while her work continued to be reviewed and discussed in the Western World’s leading publications into the 1980s.

With Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen she was considered a master of the modern “woman’s novel,” tales of love, betrayals and domestic machinations which explore the turmoils of unfulfilled heroines.

In her study “Rosamond Lehmann,” Diana E. LeStourgeon wrote that the author’s “world is a feminine world, whether ‘she’ be a child of 10 listening intently to stories of a life she has yet to know, or an aristocratic dowager defining her rigid standards against the assault of her son’s mistress. . . . Whoever she is, Rosamond Lehmann knows the secret of her heart as few novelists do.”

Miss Lehmann wrote--in the puritanical post-Victorian era--of lesbianism and abortion, of young women demanding the same rights as young men. As a result she was accorded the awe normally reserved for revolutionaries.

Such subsequent novels as “A Note of Music” in 1930 and “Invitation to the Waltz” in 1932 were praised for the lyric quality of their prose as well as their insight.

Miss Lehmann, who was twice divorced, next created “The Weather in the Streets” in 1936. It brought her additional acclaim for its examination of the thought processes of women, as did “The Ballad and the Source” in 1944 and “The Gypsy’s Baby,” a collection of short stories in 1946.

A New York Times review of “The Ballad and the Source” said that Miss Lehmann “broods delicately and beautifully over the past, turning the gaze inward.”

The themes of unrequited love and illicit relationships continued to run through “The Echoing Grove,” a story of two sisters and the man who is married to one while the lover of the other. The book was written (1952) after the bitter breakup of Miss Lehmann’s love affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis, and critics said it was washed with her own tears.

In 1976 she published “A Sea-Grape Tree,” her first novel in nearly 20 years. In it she wrote in her high style of a dream world where knowledge comes through intuition. Despite its desolate images, it offered a hope of harmony for mankind.

Toward the end of her life, the Virago Press, which specializes in publishing work by women, republished many of her novels, introducing her to another generation of readers. In 1982 she was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

Miss Lehmann, called “one of the most beautiful women of her generation” by her friend, the poet Stephen Spender, was born Rosamond Nina Lehmann on Feb. 3, 1901.

The daughter of a member of Parliament who also was an editor of Punch, she grew up in a large, comfortable home at Bourne End on the River Thames near London. She was educated at Cambridge University.

She met her first husband, Walter Runciman, later to become Lord Runciman, at Cambridge. They married in 1923 and were divorced in 1928.

Later in 1928, she married Wogan Philipps, the eldest son of the first Lord Milford, the shipping magnate. They had two children, Hugo and Sally. That marriage ended in divorce in 1944.

Her grief over the death of her daughter from polio at age 21 led her to spiritualism and a 1967 attempt at coming to terms with that loss: “The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life.”

In it she told of her own childhood accounts of psychic encounters and visions of Sally after her daughter’s death.

In an epilogue that took the form of a letter to Sally’s daughter, her granddaughter, she wrote: “This subject of life and death and of survival of death is terribly controversial, as you will discover. But the only question that you will really feel like asking is: ‘Is it a true story?’ And I promise you it is true.”