Invitation to the Waltz

Rosamond Lehmann’s enduring classic, told from the point of view of its seventeen-year-old heroine, who has been invited to her first dance  

Today is Olivia Curtis’s seventeenth birthday. In exactly one week, she will attend her first dance. She is thrilled . . . and terrified. Will Tony Heriot ask her to dance? Will he even remember that they once attended the same costume party? What will she wear? Something bright and beautiful—red silk? In the handsome diary she receives as a gift, Olivia shares her innermost doubts and fears—about her pretty, confident older sister, Kate, her precocious baby brother, James, her eccentric country neighbors, and of course, the upcoming party, which she is sure will be the crowning event of her young life.
 
Divided into three parts—Olivia’s birthday, the day leading up to the party, and the breathtaking event itself—Invitation to the Waltz masterfully captures the conflicting emotions of a teenager on the threshold of womanhood. Will this be the night when all of Olivia’s dreams come true?

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.