Rosamond Lehmann's sad retreat

However, Rosamond was resurrected, as she herself put it, at the beginning of the 1980s, and enjoyed 10 years of real prestige. Concerning The Weather in the Streets, her archetypal account of the anguish of an affair with a married man, a new generation of readers exclaimed "Oh Miss Lehmann, that's my story exactly!"

More durably, the real originality of form that distinguishes this novel and a couple of others - a sophisticated art concealed by the apparently artless emotion - began to be recognised.

Now safely dead, she has been the subject of literary conferences in Cambridge and at the Sorbonne; studies have been written, her books have been dramatised on radio and television. Now this long-awaited authorised biography appears from someone who knew her well for many years as a family friend.

Selina Hastings has the incomparable skill of capturing the essence of a life rather than taking the reader on a long plod through the dates of Bloomsbury house parties. At the same time, no relationship or encounter is omitted that can add another touch to the picture that gradually emerges.

Mistress of her material, she pays full tribute to Rosamond's qualities of intelligence, warmth, interest in others and passionate commitment; not till halfway through this book and the subject's life, does a lethal quote appear. The poet Stephen Spender remarked: "(She) was such a delightful person, very sympathetic, very charming: the most puzzling thing about her is that she was a total egotist."

This Rosamond, whom I, too, knew, was lamentably unfitted to cope even with the commonplace batterings of time and chance, let alone with a serious blow, and her insatiable demands upon family, friends and lovers did not make them love her more. Two marriages and two high-profile romantic affairs (as well as several others) came to grief, and she never either forgave or understood.

Violet Hammersley, no stranger to turbulent affairs herself, remarked perspicaciously to Rosamond's brother John that she thought "it was like a grave illness, this need of flattery and worship", and that what each new man provided was "not falling in love but the giving of the injection, as it were".

Inevitably, by the time Rosamond was a large and over-made-up 60-year-old, men prepared to supply the injection were few on the ground, but this she ignored, claiming non-existent passions in others' breasts and creating, by her genuine hospitality, the illusion of being sought-after. Similarly, and far more horribly, when her beloved daughter Sally died, she was completely unable to accept that such a tragedy could befall herself. Her solution was to insist that Sally still lived and sent her enthusiastic messages about the flowers and the life on the Other Side.

As her biographer observes: "She had to have Sally back, in some shape or form, and if the price was the total and uncritical acceptance of what the rational world regarded as the simplistic imaginings of a group of mediums, then it was a price she was only too willing to pay."

The price she actually paid for retreating into self-enhancing pretences was that she lost the capacity to focus on truth and was thus finished as a novelist. Her last, late venture into fiction was a feeble fantasy. But her other books remain, untarnished by time, arresting in their reality, bringing genuine messages to new cohorts of readers: that, in the end, is what counts.

Selina Hastings singles out for particular praise the lucid Invitation to the Waltz and the short stories, while I rate highest the subtle construction of The Echoing Grove - but as a life revealed, this biography could not be bettered.