Those themes are explored through the character of Rebecca Landon, who appears as an innocent girl in Lehmann's bestselling The Ballad and the Source, and as an emotionally wounded woman in her sequel, A Sea-Grape Tree, written over thirty years later.
The Ballad and the Source: In this New York Times bestseller, when the former best friend of Rebecca Landon's grandmother returns home to England, the ten-year-old girl is enchanted by the elderly woman's magnetic personality and shockingly blunt manner. Rebecca comes to learn that Sibyl Jardine left her husband for another man decades ago, becoming estranged from her daughter and never seeing her grandchildren... until now.
A Sea-Grape Tree: In this lyrical sequel set in 1933, an adult Rebecca has fled to an island in the Caribbean, after a heart-wrenching betrayal by her married lover. There, she meets a colony of expatriates, including a former pilot who was crippled in the war and now lives as a recluse, with whom she begins an affair. But there's yet another presence on the island-the spirit of the complex woman who fascinated Rebecca as a child: Sibyl Jardine.
"[Lehmann] has every quality that a great writer should possess... [including] an astonishing, unembarrassed emotionality that gives visceral power to her recurring themes-thwarted love, faithlessness, the unbearable sadness of naïve romantic feelings being crushed by the passage of time."
Jonathan Coe
"[Lehmann] broods delicately and beautifully over the past, turning the gaze inward."
