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This is Judith Earle's story - her solitary childhood spent in the seclusion of her riverside house, her awkward, intense experiences at Cambridge rounded with passion and disillusionment, and her travels abroad with her elegant, socialite mother. Above all, this novel is about Judith's consuming relationship with the Fyfe family, who each fall in love with Judith, transforming her young womanhood.

Olivia Curtis wakes to her seventeenth birthday and her presents: a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first evening dress, a diary for her innermost thoughts, a china ornament, and a ten shilling note. Safe within the bosom of a family at once lovingly familiar yet curiously remote, she stands poised on the brink of womanhood, anticipating her first dance with tremulous uncertainty and excitement - the greatest, yet most terrifying, event in her restricted social life.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

La relecture aujourd'hui de L'invitation à la valse, outre la parenté de son auteur avec le Valéry Larbaud d'Enfantines qu'elle explique, révèle assez bien le parfum de scandale qui entoura Rosamond Lehmann dans les lettres anglaises.

On retrouve ici Olivia, l'héroïne de l'Invitation à la valse : elle a vieilli, s'est mariée. A nouveau son chemin croise celui du séduisant Rollo. Vont-ils céder à leur commune passion ? Dans l'état intermédiaire qui sépare le vert paradis de l'enfance de l'âge de raison, l'invitation à l'amour sera cette fois plus grave, presque dramatique.