ABSTRACT
Rosamond Lehmann's concerns about her own second novel were initially undoubtedly aesthetic rather than commercial. Chatto had been forced to bow to commercial pressure, typographical wrappers which had previously been both their choice and Lehmann's. As in Dusty Answer, there are explicit references throughout A Note in Music to the First World War is 'an unforgotten shadow in much writing of the 1930s'. Atkins does admit that there are some good descriptions of 'working class people' in A Note in Music, examine the form of class consciousness manifested by the principal working-class characters. The committee expressed the hope that the Society would 'become, in wider and deeper directions than the mere choice and purchase of books, a real association of enthusiasts in modern literature'. The accusations of snobbery which were to surface so frequently in the contemporary critiques of A Note in Music might more fairly have been levelled at the book's first reviewer, whose commendation had so delighted Chatto.
