Rose Macaulay (1881–1958)
Author of The Towers of Trebizond
About the Author
Works by Rose Macaulay
Roloff Beny interprets in photographs Pleasure of ruins by Rose Macaulay (1977) 170 copies, 1 review
The valley captives 3 copies
The Secret River 3 copies
Rose Macaulay 2 copies
Book-Building after a Blitz 2 copies
Miss Anstruther's Letters 1 copy
Simfonije u kamenu 1 copy
Associated Works
British Women Writers: An Anthology from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (1989) — Contributor — 61 copies, 1 review
Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895-1954 (Handheld Weirds, 7) (2022) — Contributor — 31 copies
Ladies of Horror: Two Centuries of Supernatural Stories by the Gentle Sex (1971) — Contributor — 28 copies
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies, 1 review
Modern books and writers: The catalogue of an exhibition held at 7 Albemarle Street, April to September 1951 (1951) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Macaulay, Emilie Rose
- Birthdate
- 1881-08-01
- Date of death
- 1958-10-30
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Oxford(Somerville College)
Oxford High School for Girls - Occupations
- novelist
travel writer
literary critic - Organizations
- Peace Pledge Union
- Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander, 1958)
- Agent
- Caroline Dawnay (PFD)
- Relationships
- Bowen, Elizabeth (friend)
Conybeare, William John (grandfather) - Short biography
- Emilie Rose Macaulay was one of six children of a classical scholar at Cambridge. She lived near Genoa, Italy during her childhood, and finished her education at home in England in Oxford. Rose Macaulay never married and devoted her life to her writing. She had a secret affair from about 1918 to 1942 with Gerald O'Donovan, a former priest, himself a novelist. She travelled extensively and some of her popular works inspired by her trips include The Pleasure of Ruins (1953). She was awarded the DBE shortly before her death in 1958. Her private correspondence was published posthumously in the trilogy Letters to a Friend (1961), Last Letters to a Friend (1962) and Letters to a Sister (1964).
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Rugby, Warwickshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Varezze, Italy
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Great Shelford, England, UK - Place of death
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
I began ‘The World My Wilderness’ feeling rather lukewarm about it, as the opening pages confused me with descriptions of two women without making it clear which was which. Once the plot moved from rural France to London, though, it became very compelling. The setting and themes have a curious similarity to [b:Space Below My Feet|18595791|Space Below My Feet|Gwen Moffat|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398035623s/18595791.jpg|26342413], the memoir of a young woman who deserted from show more the ATS immediately after WWII to live rough and climb mountains. The main character of ‘The World My Wilderness’ is Barbary, a young woman who lived with her family in occupied France during WWII and struggles to adjust to postwar London. Her piratical name is indicative of her nature; helping the marquis fight the Nazis during wartime has traumatised and hardened her. Despite the comfort of living with her father (who divorced her mother and remarried), she camps in ruins and steals whenever possible. I appreciated Macaulay’s depiction of the Second World War’s legacy in England as the absolute opposite of ennobling. Instead, rationing and privation has made everyone dishonest and suspicious, most criminal, and some violent. The book’s main message seems to be that the war smashed the veneer of civilisation, not just in the places most obviously occupied and destroyed, but more fundamentally. The social contract was ripped up and seemingly well brought up young ladies like Barbary got mixed up in sabotage and murder.
Unlike [b:Space Below My Feet|18595791|Space Below My Feet|Gwen Moffat|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398035623s/18595791.jpg|26342413], which is fundamentally an optimistic account of female freedom, ‘The World My Wilderness’ is pessimistic about Barbary’s future. It’s clear to her family that she had some intensely traumatic experiences during the war, which the reader finds out included being raped and tortured. Subsequently running away from her family and shoplifting don’t make her happy, because she cannot escape what she went through. The narrative examines this, and the responses of her family, with considerable subtlety. The characters are all very well observed and their moods and awkwardness entirely convincing. Two other notable features are the treatment of religion and of the built environment. In the former case, I was reminded of [b:Brideshead Revisited|111620|Brideshead Revisited|Evelyn Waugh|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1393880521s/111620.jpg|2952196] as Catholicism is seen as a comforting way to turn against the frightening present and hark back to the golden-hued past. Various characters seem ready to believe in hell but disinterested in other Christian doctrine, including a traumatised priest. The tradition and ritual of religion seem to offer only limited comfort in the wake of world war, yet for some this is better than nothing.
As for the built environment, Macaulay’s most beguiling writing is reserved for the haunted ruins of bombed-out London, where Barbary and her disreputable pals lurk all day. The lyrical, effusive descriptions of an urban fabric being reclaimed by nature bring to mind [b:After London: or, Wild England|2220037|After London or, Wild England|Richard Jefferies|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348221574s/2220037.jpg|905982]. These sequences also reminded me that London was so denuded of people during WWII that it only returned to its pre-war population level about five years ago.
I found this novel to be a surprising and thought-provoking reflection on the war’s domestic legacy. Barbary and her family are fascinating characters and it is notable that no soldiers appear, other than a few deserters. The war’s impact on civilians and society is examined in a clever, original way. It is made clear that individuals and society cannot return to their happier pre-war state, although Macaulay does not suggest that recovery is impossible. When the book was first published in 1950, though, it must still have seemed a long way away. show less
Unlike [b:Space Below My Feet|18595791|Space Below My Feet|Gwen Moffat|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398035623s/18595791.jpg|26342413], which is fundamentally an optimistic account of female freedom, ‘The World My Wilderness’ is pessimistic about Barbary’s future. It’s clear to her family that she had some intensely traumatic experiences during the war, which the reader finds out included being raped and tortured. Subsequently running away from her family and shoplifting don’t make her happy, because she cannot escape what she went through. The narrative examines this, and the responses of her family, with considerable subtlety. The characters are all very well observed and their moods and awkwardness entirely convincing. Two other notable features are the treatment of religion and of the built environment. In the former case, I was reminded of [b:Brideshead Revisited|111620|Brideshead Revisited|Evelyn Waugh|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1393880521s/111620.jpg|2952196] as Catholicism is seen as a comforting way to turn against the frightening present and hark back to the golden-hued past. Various characters seem ready to believe in hell but disinterested in other Christian doctrine, including a traumatised priest. The tradition and ritual of religion seem to offer only limited comfort in the wake of world war, yet for some this is better than nothing.
As for the built environment, Macaulay’s most beguiling writing is reserved for the haunted ruins of bombed-out London, where Barbary and her disreputable pals lurk all day. The lyrical, effusive descriptions of an urban fabric being reclaimed by nature bring to mind [b:After London: or, Wild England|2220037|After London or, Wild England|Richard Jefferies|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348221574s/2220037.jpg|905982]. These sequences also reminded me that London was so denuded of people during WWII that it only returned to its pre-war population level about five years ago.
Still the ghosts of the centuries-old merchant cunning crept and murmured among weeds and broken stones, flitted like bats about dust-heaped, gaping rooms. But their companion ghosts, ghosts of ancient probity, honourable and mercantile and proud and tough, that had lived side by side with cunning in the stone ways, and in the great blocks of warehouses and offices and halls, had deserted and fled without trace, leaving their broken dwellings to the creeping jungle and the crafty shades.
I found this novel to be a surprising and thought-provoking reflection on the war’s domestic legacy. Barbary and her family are fascinating characters and it is notable that no soldiers appear, other than a few deserters. The war’s impact on civilians and society is examined in a clever, original way. It is made clear that individuals and society cannot return to their happier pre-war state, although Macaulay does not suggest that recovery is impossible. When the book was first published in 1950, though, it must still have seemed a long way away. show less
What a strange, strange book with a seemingly naïve main character, Barbary Deniston, who after a London upbringing goes with her mother to the South of France in 1939 and spends the next seven years there, learning to speak Midi French and running wild with the young Maquis.
The book starts in 1946 and Barbary returns to a London devastated by the Blitz, still full of the ruins of bombed buildings, which are populated by deserters, on the run from military police.
Macaulay’s descriptions show more of bomb scarred London seem surreal, more like something out of a J G Ballard novel, although presumably realistic of that post-war period:
The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs. (page 49)
Summer slipped on; a few blazing days, when London and its deserts burned beneath a golden sun, and the flowering weeds and green bracken hummed with insects, and the deep underground cells were cool like churches, and the long grass wilted, drooped and turned to hay; then a number of cool wet days, when the wilderness was sodden and wet and smelled of decay, and the paths ran like streams, and the ravines were deep in dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes. (page 74)
It is also a wonderfully literate book, opening and closing with quotes from The Waste Land, and referencing amongst others Shakespeare, Marlowe and Pepys.
For me this book has only a meandering narrative about the uneasy compromises of war, instead seeking to capture the mood of a well-off, but partly Bohemian, English family after World War II, and, most memorably (although there are descriptions of the French Pyrénées and the Scottish Highlands), the ruins of a London peopled by the ghosts of merchants and artisans from centuries past.
Richie at the end of the book looks across the ruins of the City of London in the autumn and quotes:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. show less
The book starts in 1946 and Barbary returns to a London devastated by the Blitz, still full of the ruins of bombed buildings, which are populated by deserters, on the run from military police.
Macaulay’s descriptions show more of bomb scarred London seem surreal, more like something out of a J G Ballard novel, although presumably realistic of that post-war period:
The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs. (page 49)
Summer slipped on; a few blazing days, when London and its deserts burned beneath a golden sun, and the flowering weeds and green bracken hummed with insects, and the deep underground cells were cool like churches, and the long grass wilted, drooped and turned to hay; then a number of cool wet days, when the wilderness was sodden and wet and smelled of decay, and the paths ran like streams, and the ravines were deep in dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Mayan temples, hiding them from prying eyes. (page 74)
It is also a wonderfully literate book, opening and closing with quotes from The Waste Land, and referencing amongst others Shakespeare, Marlowe and Pepys.
For me this book has only a meandering narrative about the uneasy compromises of war, instead seeking to capture the mood of a well-off, but partly Bohemian, English family after World War II, and, most memorably (although there are descriptions of the French Pyrénées and the Scottish Highlands), the ruins of a London peopled by the ghosts of merchants and artisans from centuries past.
Richie at the end of the book looks across the ruins of the City of London in the autumn and quotes:
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. show less
Set in Devon and Cambridge in 1640-1641, on the eve of the English Civil War, packed with poets, politics, and theological disputes, intensely language-based, with a subversive feminist agenda and scarcely a description of a costume or a piece of furniture anywhere in the book, this ought to be my sort of historical novel. And it very nearly was. I loved Macaulay's very precise ear for the patterns of 17th century English — both standard and in various shades of Devon dialect — and her show more ruthless elimination of 20th century language. Few historical novelists can keep that up so consistently for the length of a whole book. The central characters were promising too: two teenage girls, one a tomboy and the other a scholar; an eccentric sceptical physician; and the poet and clergyman Robert Herrick.
The trouble is, these people look as though they are being set up for an adventure story, but in fact they are only there to allow the author to comment on the ideas of 17th century England. They don't develop in the course of the story, despite listening — ad nauseam — to all sorts of clever people telling each other things they already know about current events. Not much happens, except on the news, and the characters continue much as they were, until the author gets tired of them and eliminates them arbitrarily.
With hindsight, some of what Macaulay is saying about 17th century England, with moderate Anglicans caught between the hardcore puritans on one side and papists on the other on the verge of a destructive conflict, must read onto the fascism and communism of thirties Europe. But a lot of it probably reflects her own somewhat complicated religious feelings as well.
A very interesting book, as history, and a very clever one technically, but I found it a disappointment as a novel. Obviously written as a by-product of Macaulay's Milton biography. show less
The trouble is, these people look as though they are being set up for an adventure story, but in fact they are only there to allow the author to comment on the ideas of 17th century England. They don't develop in the course of the story, despite listening — ad nauseam — to all sorts of clever people telling each other things they already know about current events. Not much happens, except on the news, and the characters continue much as they were, until the author gets tired of them and eliminates them arbitrarily.
With hindsight, some of what Macaulay is saying about 17th century England, with moderate Anglicans caught between the hardcore puritans on one side and papists on the other on the verge of a destructive conflict, must read onto the fascism and communism of thirties Europe. But a lot of it probably reflects her own somewhat complicated religious feelings as well.
A very interesting book, as history, and a very clever one technically, but I found it a disappointment as a novel. Obviously written as a by-product of Macaulay's Milton biography. show less
Denham Dobie's father gave up being a vicar because he just couldn't be bothered with people. He moves to a remote, inaccessible region of Andorra where, when Denham's story begins, he has been irritated to death by a visit from his late wife's witty, erudite and sociable family. Denham returns with these relatives to London, where she valiantly tries to hold up her end at endless dinners and evening entertainments. Her aunt has told her that "women who don't talk when they are out are a show more public nuisance," so Denham casts around desperately for topics: the diseases of dogs; the weather. She has some success with, "What is your favourite pudding?" I loved Denham for her social ineptitude.
Poor Denham. She falls in love with Arnold, a publisher who, like almost everyone in Denham's new social circle, is writing a book. She never does understand why they must do everything together, why they can't live where they like and do the things that they enjoy.
An entertaining, yet thought-provoking book. I felt for the direct, silent Denham who, misrepresented by gossip and hounded by her chattering aunt, asks herself, "Why must these people talk so much?" show less
Poor Denham. She falls in love with Arnold, a publisher who, like almost everyone in Denham's new social circle, is writing a book. She never does understand why they must do everything together, why they can't live where they like and do the things that they enjoy.
An entertaining, yet thought-provoking book. I felt for the direct, silent Denham who, misrepresented by gossip and hounded by her chattering aunt, asks herself, "Why must these people talk so much?" show less
Lists
Women in War (1)
Best First Lines (1)
Backlisted (1)
Nifty Fifties (1)
Folio Society (1)
A Novel Cure (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 52
- Also by
- 16
- Members
- 3,856
- Popularity
- #6,574
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 83
- ISBNs
- 228
- Languages
- 7
- Favorited
- 16
