The Weather in the Streets

"Of course. This is one of my favourite novels of all time, actually. I think Rosamond Lehmann is criminally under-acclaimed. As you say, it was written in 1936, but it feels like such a modern novel because the protagonist, Olivia is dealing with so many modern dilemmas. I read it in my early- to mid-thirties, when I was married and undergoing IVF. The IVF was unsuccessful. Then I got pregnant naturally, and then I had a miscarriage at three months. This all happened in the space in one year. The Weather in the Streets deals not only with the ethics of being ‘the other woman,’ which is what Olivia is—she’s having an affair with a married man, so she’s partly responsible for the failure of a marriage, which you only see off-screen—but also deals with getting pregnant and having an abortion. It was one of the first ever novels to include a very viscerally conveyed abortion scene. It’s a back-street abortion scene, and it is so incredibly well-written in a powerful and understated way. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Olivia, the protagonist, is so interesting because of the way Rosamond Lehmann writes: she’ll sometimes switch from third person to first person within the space of paragraphs. So you have this feeling of being both inside Olivia’s head and outside observing it. And then, after the abortion, you have the feeling to the extreme degree she’s had this experience that’s deeply emotional but is also observing it happened to her. That’s is exactly how I felt when I went through my miscarriage. It was a period of kind of numbness and automated behaviour, and I was observing myself going through it thinking, ‘I’m handling this really well.’ It was only about a month later that I realised that I hadn’t really handled it and my marriage ended. The Weather in the Streets was a very important book for me at that specific time. It really, really has. It’s interesting because there are lots of authors who don’t like to read other books while their writing their own. I’ve never understood that, because I need constantly to be reading something, constantly to be engaged, and to feel understood on the page, and inspired, and all of those things. So yes, fiction has hugely, hugely helped me. Curtis Sittenfeld is actually quite an important author to me. She’s terrific. She wrote a book call Prep which is all about not fitting in at school. I read it years after I left school, but it was very helpful in some ways to allow those themes to percolate. I’m just looking at my bookshelf now, and I’m just thinking that there are a lot of tricky heterosexual relationships in a lot of my books. But I read Rosamond Lehmann at a specific time of my life, when my marriage was breaking down. There’s also Elena Ferrante and her Neapolitan Quartet . Oh my god! I read that as my marriage was breaking down; I went to LA for two months to restore myself and read the Elena Ferrante books at that time. I found them so invigorating, because it’s entirely about female friendship, which at the time didn’t get that much airplay. And it was entirely about the female experience, and what women go through, and how fucking strong they are. And again about reclaiming that narrative and giving it the space for four books. I found it really helped at a time when I needed that kind of strength. So I definitely find myself in the pages of fiction. Actually, as an addendum to that: when I lived in Northern Ireland, I never wanted to read novels set in Northern Ireland, because it was just too close to home. There was a lot going on when I was living there—we moved there in 1982, and the Good Friday Agreement wasn’t signed until 1998. I saw a lot of bombs, was very aware of the political tension. On the way to school every morning I would get stopped by military checkpoints, all that sort of stuff. So I didn’t want to read novels set about the Troubles . But I just recently felt a real thirst to discover more about the history that I lived through. I recently read an amazing nonfiction book called Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe which is all about that period of history. So I think sometimes it just takes a while to process it, and then I’m ready to read the books associated with that time."