These are Just Romances: Love and the Single Woman in the Fiction of Rosamond Lehmann

Abstract

This article is a comparative analysis of Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927) and The Weather in the Streets (1936). It positions the romance plot of these fictions as part of a wider narrative concerning the single woman in the interwar years. Drawing on contexts of middlebrow culture, it tracks the single woman's renegotiation of romance in Lehmann's novels, arguing that the single woman appears as a fragmented and conflicted figure.

Keywords

• cultural hierarchy
• emma sterry
• middlebrow
• romance
• rosamond lehmann
• single woman
• transgressive sexuality