The dancing, the people beyond were nothing, a froth on the surface, soon to be blown away . Waking on her seventeenth birthday, Olivia Curtis senses that life is about to begin. Among her gifts are a diary for her innermost thoughts, a ten-shilling note, and a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first evening dress - the dress that she will wear in a week's time at the most important, and most terrifying, event of her life so far. Her first dance. Delicately observed but suffused with emotional intensity, Invitation to the Waltz is a timeless portrait of the uncertainties and ecstasies of a young woman poised on the threshold of adulthood. 'No English writer has told of the pains of women in love more truly or more movingly than Rosamond Lehmann' MARGHANITA LASKI 'So many of Olivia's worries will be acutely, painfully familiar to anyone who has ever been young . every emotional ripple is beautifully observed' GUARDIAN 'A novelist in the grand tradition, and, more than this, an innovator, the first writer to filter her stories through a woman's feelings and perceptions' ANITA BROOKNER.