Rosamond Nina Lehmann, The Echoing Grove

Wendy Pollard (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Atasoy Emrah (University of Warwick), Gina Lyle (University of Glasgow), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1953

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Shortly before the publication of

The Echoing Grove

, Rosamond Lehmann described her new novel (generally regarded as her last work of major significance) as completing “some cycle of experience that had opened when I was a girl”. The tone of the novel is bleak, yet the resolution of the plot offers hope for the future, whereas a characteristic of her previous novels had been the ambiguity of their endings. The outstanding features of the novel are its complex narrative structure, its pervasive symbolism, and its penetrating examination of changes within both masculinity and femininity between the early 1920s and the end of the Second World War.

There are allusions in the novel to the poems of William Blake, and the first word of the title derives from “The Echoing Green”, one of

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1044 words

Citation: Pollard, Wendy. "The Echoing Grove". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 September 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1015, accessed 16 May 2024.]

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