Lehmann was one of the most distinguished British writers of the 20th century. She grew up in a family full of artists, writers, and publishers. She could not and did not want to extricate herself from the culture. Her father, Rudolph Chambers Lehmann was one of the founders of Granta magazine and editor of the Daily News, her brother an acquaintance of hers a writer and her sister an actress Beatrix Lehmann.
“The Swan at Sunset” (Fragments of an Inner Life), now published by Errata Naturae, is his only autobiographical work. Rosamund Lehman reviews her privileged childhood before the First World War (she was born in Buckinghamshire in 1901), the ins and outs of governesses that filled her formative years (she was educated at home, with private tutors, until she attended Cambridge University ) and complicity between siblings. But after these episodes of light come much more traumatic experiences.
One morning he discovers a small blackbird with a broken neck. It seems like a bad omen. A few hours later, Lehmann receives a phone call announcing that Sally, his twenty-four-year-old daughter, has died.
This tragedy marked the life of the writer. Desperate for answers, Ella Lehmann entered a parallel world and underwent a series of overwhelming psychic and mystical experiences. “The swan in the sunset” she reflects them. Graduated in English Literature and Modern and Medieval Languages, the author begins to be interested in the tradition of spiritualism.
His first novel, “Vanarespondencia”, published in 1927, had arrived surrounded by scandal and that condition was not going to leave him throughout his life. Added to that was his circle of “outside the conventional” friends, legendary members of the Bloomsbury group like Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, or Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Since the late 1930s, Rosamond Lehmand had a romantic relationship with the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the well-known actor Daniel Day-Lewis. In 1982, eight years before her death, she was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
LIFE BEYOND
“I am convinced that, in another fifty or a hundred years, survival beyond death will be ‘proven’ as scientific fact, and those who seek proof will have it once and for all. Although I also suspect that when such proof exists , visible, audible, some will refuse to accept them. One of the things I have discovered is that many people put up such a rigid and inherent resistance to the idea of ??’moving on’ that nothing and no one will be able to overcome it.”
THE EXPERIENCE OF SPIRITISM
“The first time I attended a clairvoyant session was at the beginning of 1959, at the Institute of Psychic Sciences. My parents had shown severe prejudices towards spiritualism (or towards what they understood of it) and I really thought that I was ready to lend myself to an hour of moral embarrassment and ethical ignominy”
THE REVOLUTION OF THE SENSES
“At one point, it dawned on me that whatever was happening to me, I was having the complete opposite visual experience from what I’d had on mescaline about a year and a half earlier! And thankfully! On that occasion a world of hard contours, albeit with a potential for reptilian movement, had been revealed to me An elegant pot of gloxinia became an artifact, an astonishing object carved from jade and snowy quartz with shades of pink, silk and the wool took on sculptural folds”.
WE WILL SEE US AGAIN
“In these years, Sally and other people – some disembodied – have given me clues about how I will feel when I wake up after leaving my body, so I wait, I wait eagerly. But sometimes the physical bodies fight a fierce fight to resist. I “I pray that mine doesn’t put up too much resistance. As far as Sally has gone – and I know she has – she will be waiting for me, just as she promised. She will open the door for me and invite me in.”
