Rose Macaulay was born into an intellectual family in 1881 in
Rugby. When she was six, the family moved to a small coastal
village in Italy, where her father made a living as a translator of
classical works and editor of textbooks. There, she developed a
sense of adventure that was to be a dominant feature of her
life.
Macaulay returned to Britain to be educated at Oxford, and after
graduating went to London to write. She soon became one of the most
popular novelists of her day and a key figure in the 1920s literary
scene – swimming with Rupert Brooke, attending the farewell party
for Isherwood and Auden on the eve of their departure for the
Spanish Civil War, trying to teach E.M. Forster to use crutches,
celebrating Christmas with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
at Sissinghurst.
Macaulay’s literary output was prolific and diverse; she was the
author of some thirty-nine books, mainly novels and comedies, but
also poetry, essays on literature, religion and travel writing,
including the excellent ‘The Pleasure of Ruins’, a book combining
travel, archaeology and autobiography. Among her many celebrated
novels of the 1920s and 1930s are Told By An Idiot, Crewe Train,
The World My Wilderness and They Were Defeated. Her career
culminated in her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond, which she
referred to as ‘my own story’. Here she managed to bring together
innumerable threads of her talent, producing a novel at once funny
and sad, lighthearted and deeply felt, flippant and profound.
Rose Macaulay never married. She was created Dame Commander of the
British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.
'Rose Macaulay is so artful, so witty, so responsive. The Towers of
Trebizond is a book which will irradiate not only the wet
afternoons of a summer holiday, but memory as well.'
The Times 'Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond is
an utter delight, the most brilliantly witty and captivatingly
charming book I have read. Fantasy, farce, high comedy, delicious
japes at many aspects of the frenzied modern world and a succession
of illuminating thoughts about love, sex, life, churches and
religion are all tossed together with enchanting results. Humane
and shrewd, Rose Macaulay's is an engaging and idiosyncratic
talent.'
New York Times
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