From May To October
by Jennifer Lash
Hamish Hamilton, 6.95 pounds
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A Review by Hermione Lee
The Observer
12 October 1980
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            Jennifer Lash specialises in fine writing -- her last, "The Dust Collector," was a mannered, evocative prose-poem, indebted to Joyce and Woolf.  "From May To October" is, again, a dedicated to the celebration of married love: --

               "All ageing and change was broached utterly by their love; that quality which is caring and power and affinity.  Love is a word; a sound that gathers about it images and hopes of a totality within experience that is a certain sense, beyond the powers of science or scholarship."

                Well, give me science or scholarship, if this sort of soppy vagueness is their alternative.  But "From May To October" is in fact, tougher and more interesting than the rhapsodic passages suggest.  Ms. Lash can be sharp when she chooses, as with the family for whom 'Punctuality was a sign of moral fortitude.'  And Caroline Lambert's summer in which she tries to balance her large family, her painting, her husband's money worries (his bookshop is failing, their ramshackle country house is mortgaged), and the claims of feminist friends, managing mother-in-law, local gossips and summer visitors, becomes engrossing.  The tensions for Caroline (who is Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in one) between the constricting pattern of everyday life and the significance of the whole, between being apart and belonging to the family, is explored wisely and sympathetically, if over-effusively.