Rose Macaulay

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 professor of English and Women's Studies at Georgetown University, founding editor of the journal Turn-of-the-Century Women, and author of many articles in various periodicals, including Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies and The Dickensian. He is a book collector specializing in writers of the late Victorian period, and presumably many items noted as having been "Lent anonymously" are from his collection . He has also published various articles in Notes and Queries, Browning Institute Studies, and other learned journals, as well as being co-editor of The Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal. At present he is compiling what promises to be the definitive bibliography of Max Beerbohm. As might be expected, Max is well represented (youthful as he was in the 1800s), as an early chronicler of the period and by caricatures of a number of its leading participants. Edwin Gilcher Cherry Plain, New York ROSE MACAULAY Jeanette N. Passty. Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. $34.50 ACCORDING TO SANDRA GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR'S No Man's Land, Modernism is the literary extension of post-Victorian sexual dynamics, specifically of the battle of the sexes. This gender-based model of modernism was objectified politically as the women's suffrage movement; in literature, it accounts for the combative, exclusionary reactions of male misogyny and female dreams of women-only utopias. Not all the writers who shaped modernism took sides, however. One persistent voice argued for a cessation of hostilities on the grounds of consanguinity: Rose Macaulay's androgynous vision of the world saw it peopled by a fellowship of human beings, brothers and sisters, whose biological sex was incidental to their seeming masculinity or femininity. Jeanette N. Passt/s Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay offers a thorough analysis of Macaulay's androgynous alternative to humanity's internecine war. Revised from her 1982 University of Southern California dissertation, drawing on newly uncovered primary sources, this book is an original evaluation of the consistent and deliberate theme in Macaulay's twenty-three novels from 1906 to 1956: her "credo that a human being is best fulfilled by pursuing a way of life that will let him or her be true to the Inner 352 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Self (17). Critical response to Macaulay's work, in the thirty years since her death, was limited (Passty's introduction rapidly surveys it) but it did hint at androgynous qualities in Macaulay's life and work; Passty's exhaustive research convincingly accounts for, isolates, and explains Rose Macaulay's essential theme. Macaulay manifests this theme through consistent androgynous characterization. By believing, as Passty argues, that "an individual's appearance, mannerisms, psychological and social functioning, chosen vocation and chosen avocations . . . might be masculine and/or feminine in varying degrees without regard to the nominal sex of the individual possessing or pursuing them" (41), and by presenting "feminine men" and "masculine women," generally twinned as siblings or cousins (42), Macaulay indicates both the boundless potential of androgynous humanity and the limitations a gender-conscious society imposes on those who would be free of its stereotypes. Macaulay drew her "feminine men"—delicate, timid, pretty, artistic, homosexually inclined—from her own "male fantasy projections of herself and from men she knew; her "masculine women . . . were inspired ... by a persistent state of [her] 'boyish' body and androgynous mind" (42). Passty's comprehensive analysis of these androgynous characters in nearly every one of Macaulay's novels comprises the bulk of her study. Macaulay's novels do present as protagonists more androgynous women than androgynous men. Most of them bear gender-ambiguous or masculine given names or nicknames—Neville, Cary, Laurie, Stanley, Denham, "John." The chief feature of their "masculinity" is their insistence on leading their own lives, in which "they dress, act, play, work, think, or dream in a way . . . more appropriate to males" in spite of the wishes of the fathers, husbands, brothers with whom they are associated (65). While she holds these "passionate individualists " up as models of a balance of human qualities, Macaulay deplores the society that assures the failure of the unwomanly woman...