A strong case for revival
Margaret Forster
ROSE MACAULAY by Sarah LeFanu Virago, £20, pp. 388, ISBN 1860499457 There are plenty of reasons for being interested in Dame Rose Macaulay, a woman who always
seems so familiar because she features in the biographies of so many other better known writers but whose own identity is curiously vague. Yet during the 1920s, 30s and 40s she was a hugely successful author, with a position at the heart of literary London. 'very far' from being any kind of 'extra'. She published 23 novels (three of which won prizes) as well as collections of essays and travel pieces, and was also a journalist with a prolific output, managing to live entirely by writing (rare for any woman in the first half of the 20th century). There is, then, surely a lot to know about her.
Sarah LeFanu uncovers the life in an admirably calm and orderly fashion, from Emilie Rose Macaulay's birth on 1 August, 1881, as the second of the seven children of an assistant master at Rugby school. For health reasons, the family moved to Italy when Rose was six, to the Ligurian coast west of Genoa, and here they stayed till she was 13, giving her an idyllic childhood. The girls did exactly what the boys did, including a great deal of adventurous swimming, so the shock of returning to England, to Oxford, and having to learn what being a girl really meant in that age was profound. Rose went to Oxford High School and then to Somerville, where she read history. She enjoyed the work, and loved playing hockey, but had problems with food, refusing to eat at all in public and very little in private, behaviour that would now, of course, be termed anorexic (in Rose's case the cause probably a desire to hang on to childhood).
She started writing soon after she left Oxford and her first novel, Abbots Verney, was published in 1906 when she was 25. It had as its theme (as many of her subsequent novels did) family entanglements. It was well received, but Rose worried that maybe it was boring — an uncertainty about the worth of her own work which continued all her life. She carried on writing, though, enjoying the process and finding it rescued her from several nervous breakdowns following traumatic events like the murder of her brother. During the first world war, she was a VAD (a hopeless one — she was too squeamish) and then became an assistant in the War Office. In 1918 she transferred to the Ministry of Information where she met Gerald O'Donovan, aged 46, a one-time priest, author of two novels, and a married man with two children. Rose fell in love with him and he with her.
This, says Sarah LeFanu, proved the turning point in her life. Rose had to decide what she was going to do and she chose 'reality: the real thing, love, the body'. She could no longer be a devout church member and could not enjoy the same intimacy with her two sisters. Gerald and her affair with him were to be kept absolutely secret. Unable, even now, to discover much about the relationship, Sarah LeFanu tries an intelligent analysis of the novels Rose wrote after it began. This turns up plenty about abandoned babies and the results of illicit unions, which leads her to comment:
There is no evidence that Rose became pregnant but it is inconceivable that pregnancy and giving birth to a child was not at least an imaginative possibility for a 36-year-old woman engaged in her first passionate sexual relationship.
But was it passionate? Was it passionately sexual? One hopes so, but there's no feeling of passion here. After Gerald's death, Rose wrote that she'd had '24 years of companionship unspoilt', adding that she would like to have had a child or two. It was a companionship forever furtive, during which Rose had lunch every other Sunday with Gerald's family, as though she was just a friend. Nothing emerges about what kept Gerald and her together in this surely unsatisfactory way and it leaves a hole at the centre of this biography, with Sarah LeFanu mercifully too honest to attempt to fill it with speculation.
Meanwhile, Rose, when not with Gerald, continued to write and to entertain. She was a great party woman, vivacious and eager, though not particularly attractive (Virginia Woolf said she looked like 'a lean sheepdog' in appearance and shuddered at how badly dressed she was). She loved driving fast, a regular Toad of Toad Hall, and often crashed her car. She was driving Gerald over Hartside pass in the Lake District when she had her worst crash and he had a stroke afterwards. He died in 1942. While he was dying, Rose wrote one of her best novels, Miss Anstruther's Letters, full of pain at her own approaching loss. She herself had another 16 years to live without him.
Rose Macaulay doesn't seem to have been a sad woman, but there is an atmosphere of sadness about this biography which is not entirely to do with Gerald. It's more to do with the realisation that her own alleged prophecy that 'my books won't live' has been fulfilled. Does it matter? It shouldn't, but somehow it does, a tittle. Perhaps Sarah LeEnnis valiant attempt to show how good her fiction is will lead to at least two or three novels being resurrected and enjoyed again.
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