Judith Earle grows up watching the house next door, waiting for the children who come and go there each summer: Roddy, golden and unreachable; Julian, brilliant and cruel to himself before he is cruel to anyone else; steady, devoted Martin; lovely, lost Mariella. She loves them all long before she understands what loving means.
At Cambridge, everything changes. Jennifer Baird walks into her life and fills it entirely - the bathing in the river, the nights talking until dawn, a happiness so complete that nothing before it seems to have counted. Then Jennifer is drawn away by someone else, and Judith is left to carry what she felt back into a world that has no use for it.
What follows is Judith's slow, aching negotiation with desire itself: with Roddy, who wants her only for a night; with Julian, who wants her more than she can return; with the girl she has lost and cannot stop loving. Rosamond Lehmann, twenty-six when the novel appeared in 1927, writes all of it - the longing for Jennifer, the longing for Roddy, the whole unruly want of a young woman becoming herself - with the same fearless, unclassifying tenderness.
Dusty Answer is a novel about what it costs to feel everything at once, and what is left when the feeling has passed.