ABSTRACT
In 1958, Rosamond Lehmann's much-loved daughter, Sally, newly married to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, died with shocking unexpectedness from polio in Jakarta. She would publish very little more in the remaining thirty-odd years of her life. Academic critics have pointed out, however, that Lehmann's interest in extrasensory perception is manifest in novels which pre-dated her daughter's death. The publication, some four years later, of Lehmann's autobiographical memoir, The Swan in the Evening, and that of her final novel, A Sea-Grape Tree, in 1976, cannot, however, be said to have enhanced her literary reputation. There were no newspaper announcements of A Sea-Grape Tree prior to publication in November 1976, or immediately afterward, as had been Collins's standard practice with regard to Lehmann's books. The final version of the manageress seems to have been more inspired by Margaret Rutherford's persona, than necessarily by Lehmann's spiritualist beliefs, as the contemporary critics assumed.
