Dangerous Ages

or, perhaps, woman beware woman. The dangerous ages are anything between 20 and 80 - and Macaulay waspishly delineates the perils of them all - the great grandmother sailing serenely into old age at one end and the young girl taking what she wants at the other - in between different dissatisfactions - the mother who can't recover her youthful intellectual brilliance and the mother who lives through her disengaged children; the career woman who denies herself the consolations of love and, somewhere around the centre, the virtuous lesbian doing good works in hoxton. This book is stylish, clever and waspish - and in many ways cruelly perceptive. I prefer the slightly softer and more rounded macaulay that comes with her later books, but show more this is both bracing and a good read show less

108/2020. The story revolves around four generations of upper middle class English women in one family and the main theme is ageing, especially into middle and old age. Think of it as a coming-of-middle-age tale. Rose Macaulay, who was about 39 when she wrote this, clearly understood her subject and communicates that understanding with skill and insight. She raises pertinent questions and even manages to provide answers for one or two of them of them, albeit answers that not everyone would find comforting.

On population: 'Neville was apt to say "It doesn't want increasing. I waited twenty minutes before I could board my bus at Trafalgar Square the other day. It wants more depleting, I should say — a Great Plague or something," a view show more which Kay and Gerda thought truly egotistical.'
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[insert guillotine emoji here]: 'When people talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.'
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Generation gaps: 'And there they were; they talked at cross purposes, these two, across the gulf of twenty years, and with the best will in the world could not hope to understand, either of them, what the other was really at. And now here was Gerda, in Mrs. Hilary's bedroom, looking across a gulf of forty years and saying nothing at all, for she knew it would be of no manner of use, since words don't carry as far as that.
So all she said was "Tea's ready, Grandmother." '
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On Freudians: 'Psycho-analysts adored sex; they made an idol of it. They communed with it, as devotees with their God. They couldn't really enjoy, with their whole minds, anything else, Mrs. Hilary sometimes vaguely felt. But as, like the gods of the other devotees, it was to them immanent, everywhere and in everything; they could be always happy.'
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Last words: ' "I certainly don't see quite what all the fuss is about," said Pamela.' show less

Written in 1921 and winner of the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse Anglais, an award set up by two French magazines in 1912. The details, including a list of other winners, are in the book Famous Literary Prizes and their Winners by Bessie Graham, which is available in the Internet Archive.

The dangerous ages are represented by five women from four generations of a well-off, middle-class, privileged family. There is no one dangerous age: Macaulay's characters experience dangers and uncertainites at many stages of their lives. The post-war years have their own dangers, with the aftermath of WWI, a new independence for women and an demanding working class.

I enjoyed Dangerous Ages, but didn't care too much for the characters. If you're interested show more in Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond is a much better book. show less