Life
1881-1958 [Dame Emilie Rose Macauley]; English novelist; brought up in Oxford, Wales and partly on the Ligurian coast nr. Genoa; new Rupert Brooke in childhood through her father, his teacher; friend of Victor Gollancz and Ivy Compton-Burnett; encouraged Elizabeth Bowen and found her a first publisher; supporter of the League of Nations; engaged in lasting friendship with Gerald O’Donovan; works incl. The World My Wilderness and The Towers of Trebizond, [her last], fiction; They Went to Portugal and Fabled Shore [Spain], travel.
Works
inc. contrib. to Cassell English Writers series; works incl. The World My Wilderness (1950; 1992), 253pp.
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Criticism
Sarah Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay (London: Virago 2003), 388pp. [reviewed by Hermione Lee in The Guardian, 14 June 2003; infra.]
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Commentary
Hermione Lee, review of Sarah Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay, in The Guardian, (14 June 2003), writes of her ‘long clandestine affair began in 1918 with Gerald O’Donovan, a lapsed Irish priest, himself a novelist, a married man who never left his wife and children but incorporated Rose into his family life.’ Further: ‘She led a double life for more than 20 years - when Gerald died in 1942, she even wrote an anonymous obituary. After her own death, when her confessional letters to an Anglican priest were published, her friends were astonished to find she had kept this secret from them. They had her pigeonholed as a “spinster” or a “Eunuch” (Woolf). / One of the secrets that LeFanu investigates, but doesn’t solve, is whether the secret affair, with no hope of children, was particularly suited to a woman whose sexuality was “ambivalent”. As a child, she wanted to be a naval captain; many of her heroines are boyish or androgynous; she shared a house for a time with the literary editor Naomi Royde-Smith, de la Mare’s lover. LeFanu deals with her subject’s sexuality rather tentatively; she doesn’t say whether she thinks Macaulay was bisexual or not. (I would have liked to know more, for instance, about her attitude to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which she was prepared to defend.)’ See also under Elizabeth Bowen, Notes, supra. [Accessed online 7 Nov. 2006.]
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Quotations
Pleasure of Ruins (1953): ‘The maze of little streets threading through the wilderness, the broken walls, the great pits with their dense forests of bracken and bramble, golden ragwort and coltsfoot, fennel and foxglove and vetch, all the wild rambling shrubs that spring from ruin, the vaults and cellars and deep caves, the wrecked guildhalls that belonged to saddlers, goldsmiths, merchant tailors, haberdashers, wax-chandlers, barbers, brewers, coopers and coachmakers, all the ancient City fraternities, the broken office stairways that spiral steeply past empty doorways and rubbled closets into the sky, empty shells of churches with their towers still strangely spiring above the wilderness, their yawning window arches where green boughs push in, their broken pacement floors, the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks once drank - all this scarred and haunted green and stone and brambled wilderness lying under the August sun, a-hum with insects and a-stir with secret, darting, burrowing life, receives us into its dwellings with a wrecked, indifferent calm. Here, its cliffs and chasms and caves seem to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set; here is the irremediable barbarism that comes from the depth of the earth.’ (Quoted by Sheenagh Pugh, on Facebook - 29.12.2019.)
Notes
The Foolish Lovers (London: Collins [1920]) by St. John Ervine contains backpage advertising lists for novels by Rose Macauley, Dangerous Ages; Mystery at Geneva; Orphan Island; Potterism; Told by an Idiot.
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