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Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (1
August 1881 – 30 October 1958) was an English writer, most noted for her
award-winning novel The
Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group
crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography,
reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs. Macaulay's novels were
partly influenced by Virginia
Woolf; she also wrote biographies and travelogues. The successful
journalist and novelist Naomi
Royde-Smith, the first woman to write the literature editorship of
the Saturday Westminster Gazettein 1912, ran a small literary salon with Rose
Macaulay in her apartment in Queensgate, Kensington. Both were friends with
Theodora Bosanquet.
Rose Macaulay was a close friend of
Sylvia Lynd, Vera
Brittain, Storm Jameson,
Mary Agnes Hamilton and
Virginia Woolf.
Macaulay was born in Rugby,
Warwickshire the daughter of George
Campbell Macaulay, a Classical
scholar, and his wife, Grace Mary Conybeare. Her father was
descended in the male-line directly
from the Macaulay
family of Lewis. She was educated at Oxford
High School for Girls and read Modern History at Somerville
College at Oxford
University.[1]
Macaulay began writing her first novel, Abbots Verney (published 1906),
after leaving Somerville and while living with her parents at Ty Isaf, near Aberystwyth,
in Wales. Later novels include The Lee
Shore (1912), Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told by an
Idiot (1923), And No Man's Wit (1940), The
World My Wilderness (1950), and The
Towers of Trebizond (1956). Her non-fiction work includes They Went to
Portugal, Catchwords and Claptrap, a biography of John
Milton, and Pleasure of Ruins. Macaulay's fiction was influenced by
Virginia Woolf and Anatole
France.[2]
During World War I Macaulay
worked in the British
Propaganda Department, after some time as a nurse and later as a civil
servant in the War Office.
She pursued a romantic affair with Gerald O'Donovan, a writer and former
Jesuit priest, whom she met in 1918; the relationship lasted until his death,
in 1942.[3]
On 16 June 1932, at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, London, a number
of British women writers and readers gathered for a Reception given by
Time and Tide, the feminist weekly newspaper founded by Lady
Margaret Rhondda in 1920. According to a report printed in The Times
the next day, among those who had accepted invitations to be present were:
Phyllis Bentley,
Stella Benson,
Vera Brittain, Professor
Winifred Cullis,
E.M. Delafield,
Susan Ertz,
Eleanor Farjeon,
Cicely Hamilton,
Winifred Holtby,
Sylvia Lynd,
Rose Macaulay,
Naomi Mitchison,
Edith Shackleton,
Rebecca West and
Ellen Wilkinson. Years
later, Naomi Mitchison described Time and Tide as 'the first avowedly
feminist literary journal with any class, in some ways ahead of its time',
which in the early 1930s was 'in full flood, with a number of good authors
writing for it'.
During
the interwar period Macaulay was a sponsor of the pacifist Peace
Pledge Union; however she resigned from the PPU and later recanted her
pacifism in 1940.[4] Her
London flat was utterly destroyed in the
Blitz, and she had to rebuild her life and library from scratch, as
documented in the semi-autobiographical short story, Miss Anstruther's
Letters, which was published in 1942.
The Towers of
Trebizond, her final novel, is generally regarded as her masterpiece.
Strongly autobiographical, it treats with wistful humour and deep sadness the
attractions of mystical Christianity,
and the irremediable conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the
Christian faith. For this work, she received the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956.
Macaulay was never a simple believer in "mere
Christianity", and her writings reveal a more complex, mystical sense of
the Divine. That said, she did not return to the Anglican church
until 1953; she had been an ardent secularist before
and, while religious themes pervade her novels, previous to her conversion she
often treats Christianity satirically, for instance in Going Abroad and The
World My Wilderness. She never married, as a result of her lengthy and secret
relationship with Gerald
O'Donovan. She was created a Dame
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) on 31 December 1957 in
the 1958 New Years Honours[7] and
died ten months later, on 30 October 1958, aged 77, an active feminist throughout
her life.[2].
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