Rose Macaulay

ELT 37:3 1994 errors in spelling and in the index, and the apparent (albeit candidly acknowledged) biases, this is an attractive book which certainly adds to the corpus of Stevenson studies and facilitates a greater appreciation of RLS's great literary achievements. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus _________________ Eastbourne, England Rose Macaulay Jane Emery. Rose MacauL·y: A Writer's Life. London: John Murray, 1991. xiii + 381pp. $34.95 ON THE MORNING of 2 September 1936, the following sobering notice appeared in the London Listener. Miss Rose Macaulay, who was killed in a flying accident yesterday... was one of our older writers, having recently turned 102. Active to the end, she continued to write books of nearly every description. Let her epitaph be, there sinks an old lady of no great talent, but who managed, on the whole, to put in a pretty good time. In fact, Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) did not die in a airplane crash in 1936, the year of her fifty-fifth birthday. The Listener had instead published a Macaulay article entitled "Full Fathom Five," a self-mocking "Auto-Obituary." But if the notice of her death in 1936 was somewhat faulty in its facts, it was perfectly accurate in its spirit. Macaulay was, indeed, active and writing to the end of her life, and will always be remembered by those who had the pleasure of knowing her as a lady who "put in a pretty good time." The daughter of a literature professor, Rose was descended from a long line of reputable English families, including the Macaulays, Conybeares , Trevelyans, Arnolds, Huxleys, and Vaughans. The historian Lord Macaulay was her grandfather's cousin. Much of Rose's childhood was spent with her parents and five siblings in the Italian coastal village of Varazze, where they lived in the hope of improving her mother's poor health. An incurable tomboy, Rose loved swimming and playing along the shore, and it was here in Varazze that she resolved that she wanted to be a sailor when she grew up, a hope that she never completely surrendered. After completing her studies at Oxford, Rose spent several unhappy years living at home with her parents, before moving to London. Once in London, however, she quickly found her place as the center of literary society, becoming close friends with a variety of writers including, 366 BOOK REVIEWS among others, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Ivy Compton -Burnett, Storm Jameson, and the Nicolsons. Victor Gollancz called her "one of the best party-goers in London," an epitaph which Rose would have thoroughly relished. In addition to her work as a journalist and broadcast debater on BBC, Rose Macaulay was the author of thirty-six books, including twentythree novels, a critical biography, five books of criticism and essays, four books of history and travel, two volumes of poetry, and an anthology. The Towers ofTrebizond (1956) is generally considered her masterpiece, and she was working on a twenty-fourth novel at the time of her death, Venice Besieged. Out of these thirty-six books, all published between 1906 and 1956, thirteen books are still in print. Ten of Macaulay's twenty-three novels were published between 1906 and 1920, beginning with Abbots Verney, a conventional first novel reflecting the influence of Victorian morality. The Secret River (1909) and The Valley Captives (1911)—described by Jane Emery as "a melodrama of sadism"—are darker novels which leave the reader with a sense of melancholy and waste. The Furnace (1907), Views and Vagabonds and The Lee Shore (both 1912)—in contrast—"show life as a bearable compromise" in which "good humour flickers throughout, and at the close, its warmth survives." Neither The Making of a Bigot (1914) nor Non-Combatants and Others (1916) was especially well-received, even though Non-Combatants, Macaulay's first war novel, was "in its consciousness of suffering and human waste, far ahead of the popular press," according to Emery. What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918) is a good-humored satire of post-war England that lampoons absurd institutional stupidity, a mild success both critically and commercially. However, Macaulay's tenth novel, Potterism: A Tragi-farcical Tract (1920), was a...