The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann

First published: 1953

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: The 1930’s and 1940’s

Locale: London and Reading

Principal Characters:

• Rickie Masters, the protagonist, a prosperous upper-middle-class businessman
• Dinah Burkett Hermann, his sister-in-law and lover, an artist and social radical
• Madeleine Burkett Masters, his wife, an upper-middle-class housewife and mother
• Mrs. Burkett, his mother-in-law and friend

The Novel

Much of the action of The Echoing Grove deals with the effect that Rickie Masters, the protagonist, has on the other characters in the novel. Since an early age, Rickie has carried the burden of expectations of great things. He has obviously deceived others into believing that there is more to him than there is. He says, “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t secretly convinced I wouldn’t come up to scratch,” and he has tried to prove himself by “doing the best or worst I was capable of, and seeing if I fell down on it.” Rickie’s relationship with his wife, Madeleine, and his sister-in-law and lover, Dinah, give him ample opportunity to test his capabilities for being his best or his worst.

The novel’s events are narrated in a mode as complex and fragmented as are the lives of the three main characters. Through flashbacks and limited points of view, the reader is shown how the love triangle takes its toll on all involved. Rickie’s affair with Dinah begins while she is visiting the home of Madeleine, Rickie, and their new baby. Rickie and Madeleine seem to have an idyllic marriage until Rickie steals away into Dinah’s bedroom late at night and proclaims that she cannot marry the barrister to whom she is engaged. She cannot marry because she and Rickie are destined to love each other.

Over the next few years, Dinah and Rickie live out their grand passion for each other in a limited manner because, to all outward appearances, Madeleine and Rickie still have an idyllic life. He is caught in a double allegiance and is torn by his deception as he attempts to keep his promises to all those for whom he feels responsible. Dinah, being a rebel, seems to fall naturally into her role as “the other woman.” She writes a novel, lives in dreadful lodgings, and associates with undesirable characters as she develops a social and political conscience. Her mode of living and her relationship with Rickie wear her down. She almost dies giving birth to their stillborn baby and, on another occasion, attempts suicide. Finally, Rickie announces that he is going to leave Madeleine and become a social pariah with Dinah. He tells Madeleine of his plans, but before he and Dinah can bolt, he suddenly becomes seriously ill with a duodenal ulcer. He is taken to a nursing home and nursed back to health by Madeleine and her mother, Mrs. Burkett. Dinah seems to have disappeared, and it is months before Rickie hears from her again.

He sees Dinah only once more, and it is for the last time. She is in a bad way and asks him for help. He gives her financial help but cannot give her what she needs: him. His loyalty to Madeleine forces him to resist the lure of his passion for Dinah. He is devastated by the experience:

. . . how sad he had been to have to show her he had handed back his ticket; considered as pure sorrow it was the worst moment of his life, the very nadir. It caused in him such trouble as might have arisen from the apparition of a revenant, holding up before him all the stillborn freedom of his life.

Dinah wants to place herself under the protection of a strong Rickie, but he cuts her off. She seems condemned to a life without light, a world of “scorching emptiness, like Hell.” Rickie returns to Madeleine, and they make love for the last time. Madeleine wins the battle for the physical Rickie, but his heart still belongs to Dinah. Madeleine is left with a man slowly killing himself for the love of another woman; she is capable only of making him feel guilty about his feelings for Dinah.

Dinah experiences some happiness when she marries a fellow struggler for the rights of the poor and oppressed, but he is killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Dinah then becomes dedicated to the class struggle in England. (These events are related to Rickie by Mrs. Burkett.) Rickie and Madeleine go on with their lives. Madeleine and the children move to Reading, and he lives in London until he succumbs to his ulcer.

While Rickie is alive, Madeleine takes a lover, whom she keeps until the day that she and Dinah reunite. The novel opens and ends in the present with the two widows trying to come to terms with themselves, each other, and Rickie, who is still the main force in their lives. Dinah offers the following advice to Madeleine:

Perhaps when we understand more, unearth more of what goes on in the unconscious, we shall manage to behave better to one another. It’s ourselves we’re trying to destroy when we’re destructive: at least I think that explains the people who never can sustain a human relationship. It’s not good and evil struggling in them: it’s the suppressed unaccepted unacceptable man or woman in them they have to cast out . . . can’t come to terms with.

The Characters

Rickie Masters is a charismatic character, a splendid actor and liar when it comes to dealing with the women in his life, but he is also, as another character says, a “tragic figure—or pretty nearly.” He is a man with whom women seem to fall in love at first sight. There is something about this handsome, sweet, prosperous, and sad man. He is not “exactly reckless but-but any moment about to do himself no good; clearly though indefinably less able than most chaps to-to take calculations and precautions, less concerned than most to provide adequate safeguards against pain to himself.” Rickie seems not only a victim of his own character but also a victim of fate; as Dinah says: “He was a romantic orphan boy, irrevocably out of the top drawer. He was never at home in his situation . . . the contemporary one, the crack-up—not just the general human situation of wondering why you’re born.”

Rickie knows better than anyone that he is not what people expect him to be. He believes that he “must have been born with some congenital defect of vision: anyway even in the nursery I couldn’t see life steady: there always seemed something coming up to fog the issues.” He is unable to lead the life to which he committed himself when he married Madeleine because he loves Dinah, and he is unable to respond to the passion of his life because he cannot bring himself to break with his code of decency. He has “thrown up the sponge, bled out his life or rather let it bleed, dead beat, indifferent,” and he keeps “flogging himself stoically along a bit further to the lonely finish.”

The temptation of Rickie’s life is Dinah, whom he sums up as “burned in the flames.” She is the rebel or wild sister. Her life is devoted to loving Rickie and breaking away from all conventions associated with her upper-middle-class upbringing. She is promiscuous, reckless, misguided, and uncompromising, but alive and eager to learn from life. She is not selfish, strives to be strong, and keeps expecting Rickie to be strong. Dinah believes that Madeleine is wrong to marry Rickie without truly loving him and wrong not to give him up when she knows that he loves Dinah; she reasons that she and Rickie are not wrong to love each other. She leads a troubled life but blames no one. She seems “driven, trapping herself over and over again because she hadn’t found out her own enemy, the one inside herself,” the unaccepted, unacceptable self with whom she cannot come to terms.

It is only after giving up on Rickie and after her husband’s death that she stops being her worst enemy: “I passed out of this circle; I gave birth to myself and entered into life.” She has to undergo a breaking of her spirit before she can be resurrected into life. When she and Madeleine are reunited, Dinah is a much more subdued and considerate person. There is hope that she and Madeleine can sustain a human relationship without betraying Rickie.

As her mother says, Madeleine does have many fine qualities. She is unfortunate in having married a man for whom her fine qualities are not enough. She is representative of her class breeding: attractive, well-dressed, and socially prosperous. Yet she wants a conventional life in which she will never have to use her brain or earn her living; she is motivated by sheer selfishness. She has never experienced passion and never will.

Critical Context

The Echoing Grove is generally regarded as Lehmann’s most effective and structurally most ambitious novel. It is similar to one of her earlier novels, The Weather in the Streets (1936), which is also concerned with a love triangle but one in which the wife remains offstage. Olivia Curtis, Dinah’s toned-down counterpart, has a sister, Kate, who is as conventional as Madeleine. Olivia is involved with Rollo Spencer, who not only is weak like Rickie but also succumbs to a physical collapse. Seventeen years later, Lehmann reworked the characters and themes at play in Olivia and Rollo’s story and added the extra dimension of having the two women in the love triangle be sisters. Rickie is a more sympathetic character than is Rollo, Dinah more realistic and forceful than Olivia, and the novel is more successful than its predecessor.

A contemporary of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf, Lehmann is not a writer of their stature, but her genuine merits as a novelist have been rediscovered after a period of critical neglect. She is technically brilliant, and her novels deal insightfully with complicated human relationships.

Bibliography

Atkins, John. Six Novelists Look at Society: An Enquiry into the Social Views of Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, Rosamond Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, Nancy Mitford, C. P. Snow, 1977.

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “Narrative License in The Echoing Grove,” in South Central Review. I (Spring/Summer, 1984), pp. 85-107.

Dorosz, Wiktoria. Subjective Vision and Human Relationships in the Novels of Rosamond Lehmann, 1975 .

Gindin, James. “Rosamond Lehmann: A Revaluation,” in Contemporary Literature. XV (1974), pp. 203-211.

LeStourgeon, Diana E. Rosamond Lehmann, 1965.