Exquisitely beautiful writing. Youthful love in all its intoxication, naïveté, bitter disappointment and regret. Dreamy and ethereal. Timeless. ( )

A classic — and controversial in its day — coming-of-age novel about a lonely young woman who goes up to Girton a couple of years after the end of the Great War. She's in love with a boy who's in love with another boy, she has a passionate affair with a girl who leaves her for an older woman, she briefly contemplates marrying two of the cousins of the first boy. There is a quite scandalous amount of nude bathing, some dangerous driving, there is a scene where a young man and a young woman are alone together in a room at Girton with the door closed — in short, it's all very Bloomsbury-fringe, and you may need an icepack if you're of a sensitive disposition.

It's not really a romance, more a novel about a young woman trying to fit in with conventional models of love and sex and finding that they don't quite work for her. But it is certainly a book that you would find very irritating if you were a young person struggling to get value out of the university system. Lehmann's privileged heroine seems to go through her three years in Cambridge without ever thinking about anything other than passion, apart from the few hours when she's busy getting a high mark in her Tripos. And she doesn't seem to have any idea of what she might want to do with her education once she's got it.

Fun, in a nostalgia-for-student-days sort of way, quite naughty in places, and by no means as pernicious and sentimental as Brideshead, but very much a product of a certain overprivileged part of English society. ( )

I'm adding this here because I just finished the abridged audio and I want to make a note to consider reading it in the future. Seemed like an entertaining story, and the writing is beautiful. ( )

I found this book on a “if you like Downton Abbey” list and lo and behold, it showed up on my library’s book sale rack! So I had a good little 25-cent read.

Written in 1927, it’s not a classic exactly, although I wonder if it has shown up on any women’s studies syllabi. It’s essentially a coming-of-age story about shy, studious Judith Earle, who is captivated by the intense, mysterious set of cousins living next door to her. She falls in love with Roddy, who to the reader is clearly gay, and is oblivious to the fact the one of the other cousins loves her. While at college, she falls in love with her female roommate, who breaks her heart when she leaves school to be with another woman.

It is fairly slow moving, floridly written and very sad, but compelling. I do enjoy books featuring mysterious intense groups of young people! The gay angle was daring for 1927 but is quite obliquely told. Judith starts out very naïve and doesn't grow much wiser, although she does grow sadder and more cynical. Like I said, it’s a sad book. ( )

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/rosamond-lehmann-reading... ( )