Rose Macaulay (1881–1958,) fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, was a British novelist, poet, historian, literary critic, anthologist, travel writer, and broadcaster. She was known for her caustic wit, satirical comedy, and lively scholarship, and, in late life, for her religious quest.
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, Macaulay was educated at Somerville College-Oxford reading history. Her first novel was Abbots Verney (1906,) followed by Views and Vagabonds (1912) and The Lee Shore (1920,) winner of a £1,000 publishers’ prize.
Macaulay’s later novels include Dangerous Ages (1921; Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize,) Crewe Train (1926,) They Were Defeated (1932,) and And No Man’s Wit (1940.) After World War II, she wrote two further novels, The World My Wilderness (1950) and The Towers of Trebizond (1956; James Tait Black Memorial Prize.) The latter, about a small Anglo-Catholic group traversing Turkey by camel, is seen as a spiritual autobiography, contemplating her changing and conflicting beliefs.
Macaulay’s travel books include They Went to Portugal (1946,) Fabled Shore (1949,) and The Pleasure of Ruins (1953.) She also produced three volumes of verse and wrote collections of essays, such as A Casual Commentary (1925) and Catchwords and Claptrap (1926.)
British journalist and writer Constance Babington Smith wrote Rose Macaulay, a Biography (1972.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Rose Macaulay
Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and other is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Aging
A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it! Again as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigors, the austerities, the renunciation of the day.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Freedom
Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Conscience
Sleeping in a bed—it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Sleep
They… threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this – animated, but collateral.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Family
Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Oddity, Peculiarity
Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Work
Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.
—Rose Macaulay
Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hours spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Reading
News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself
—Rose Macaulay
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals—or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Family
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
—Rose Macaulay
Topics: Insults
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
A. S. Byatt English Novelist, Poet
Mary Shelley English Novelist
Elizabeth Gaskell English Novelist
Rosamond Lehmann English Novelist
Ann Oakley English Sociologist, Feminist
Penelope Fitzgerald British Novelist, Biographer
Barbara Cartland English Romantic Novelist
Joan Collins English Actress
Anita Roddick English Businessperson