A Note in Music

The seductive new stranger in town becomes the symbol of everything two married women secretly long for in this richly imagined novel by one of the most distinguished writers of the twentieth century

"There is nothing here: nothing in your past, nothing in your future."

Thirty-four-year-old Grace Fairfax lives a dull, conventional existence with her dull, conventional husband, Tom, in a dreary manufacturing town in the North of England. A year ago, when a fortune-teller told her that her life lacked will and purpose, she wasn't surprised. Every day the same predictable routine-it's a wonder she doesn't go mad.

Then Hugh Miller and his sister, Clare, descend on the town. Clare is young and beautiful. Hugh seems to possess everything lacking in Grace's life: passion, vitality, and most important, the freedom to do as he pleases. Grace's best friend, Norah MacKay, isn't immune to the handsome stranger's charms, either. Married to Gerald, a curmudgeonly university professor, the mother of two has her own fantasies of desire and liberation. But Hugh isn't the man Grace and Norah imagine him to be.

In this story of two strangers who cast an otherworldly enchantment on an entire town and its inhabitants, A Note in Music presents an intensely moving portrait of marriage-its disappointments, joys, jealousies, fears, and loneliness, and the truths that remain unspoken.

"No English writer has told the pains of women in love more truly or more movingly than Rosamond Lehmann." -Marghanita Laski

"She uses words with the enjoyment and mastery with which Renoir used to paint." -Rebecca West

Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) was born on the day of Queen Victoria's funeral, in Buckinghamshire, England, the second of four children. In 1927, a few years after graduating from the University of Cambridge, she published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to critical acclaim and instantaneous celebrity. Lehmann continued to write and publish between 1930 and 1976, penning works including The Weather in the Streets, The Ballad and the Source, and the short memoir The Swan in the Evening. Lehmann was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and remains one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century.