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The World My Wilderness (1950) is a painful meditation on the social and material ruins of the Second World War. The novel's chronotope of ruins creates a palimpsest of physical, psychic, and textual dereliction. During the Blitz, air raids uncovered ancient ruins while creating new ones out of present-day buildings and infrastructure. This peculiar archaeological environment resonates with what philosophers have theorized as a ruin's multidirectional, suspended temporality. Like several other books of “ruin-mapping” in the immediate postwar period, Macaulay's novel renders this dislocated setting through a cartographic treatment of Blitzed London. Ultimately, the novel complicates conventional ways of reading both the metropolis and the Bildungsroman by emphasizing war's creation of surrogate habitats, and the residual, destructive effects on youth and maturation.

This article argues that an ethos of resistance permeates Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and develops a feminist-historical lens to read the novel as a social critique of wartime myths around collaboration and resistance. Resistance operates at the level of plot and thematically; it also marks the novel’s form; and it describes the book’s status within scholarship, as it straddles traditional timeframes and schools of criticism. The article excavates the novel’s major preoccupations with ruins as sites of resistance to consensus, and collaboration as a problematic but plausible means of wartime survival under occupation. Macaulay’s novel ‘makes history’ in all senses of the phrase: it looks back on the recent past to capture a liminal moment in British history before it solidifies into myth; it reflects in fictional form real tensions in postwar society; and it provides today’s readers with a complex understanding of a period still easily reduced to clichés.

Charles Andrews's Writing Against War enlists literary theory and peace studies to demonstrate how five modern British authors—Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf—use the resources of their craft to engage in peace activism. Questioning the common definition of pacifism as a flat and universal term, Andrews argues that pacifism is, instead, a complex assemblage of ideas and ideals. The work traces multiple interpretations of pacifism across each of these writers' respective projects. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, historians of the interwar period, and any artist who hopes to conceive of their practice as a mode of political resistance.

This article offers a discussion of two books by British women which describe travels in Spain during the post-war period, that is, during the dictatorship of General Franco. The aim is to analyse how Spanish culture and society are represented in these texts, and to what extent the authors engage with questions of the ethics of travelling to Spain in this period. Two different forms of travel - by car, and by horse - also influence the way the travellers can connect with local people; and the individual’s interest in Spain as a historical site, or as a timeless escape from industrial northern Europe, similarly affect the focus of the accounts. The global politics of travel writing, and the distinction between colonial and cosmopolitan travel writers, are important elements in our understanding of the way a foreign culture is articulated for the home market. Women’s travel writing also has its own discursive history which we consider briefly. In conclusion, texts involve common discursive and linguistic strategies which have to negotiate the specificity of an individual’s travels in a particular time and place. The authors and books referred to are Rose Macaulay’s Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (1949) and Penelope Chetwode’s Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia (1963).

In June 1937, the editorial staff of The Left Review published a pamphlet entitled 'Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War.' This pamphlet included the responses of almost one hundred and fifty United Kingdom poets and writers to the questions: 'Are you for, or against, the legal government and the people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and fascism?' The vast majority of those who responded to the leading questions the pamphlet posed replied, unsurprisingly, that they were against fascism. Within this group was the simple response 'against Franco' by Rose Macaulay, a writer whose work has been all but forgotten in the fifty-two years since her death. This paper is a discussion of the representation of the Spanish Civil War in Rose Macaulay's And No Man's Wit (1940), that questions the lack of critical appreciation this novel has received. In discussing the worth of Macaulay's novel, this work also explores the genre of women's war writing and addresses the debate which is often associated with this genre. Critical to the discussion of Macaulay's novel is the Spanish Civil War itself and Macaulay's difficult relationship with pacifism as she construed it.

In her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond, as well as in her personal biography, readers will discover an intriguing story that offers insights into obstacles to belief and into the relation of faith and doubt. Half a century ago, Rose Macaulay applied the alchemy of her art to material drawn from her own experience-as professional writer, international traveler, illicit lover, and religious pilgrim-and produced an unusual book called The Towers of Trebizond. The hydraulics of her spiritual life were such that throughout the last years of her life, when she was, to all appearances, a practicing Christian of deep piety, she remained skeptical about much that the tradition deemed essential; just as, throughout her long period as an \"Anglo-agnostic,\" she was never certain of her unbelief, or free of spiritual guilt, or unable to appreciate a good sermon.

There are more critical accounts of her by [Virginia Woolf], who gets a predictably bad press here for cattiness and jealousy. Certainly her rapid sketches aren't kind, but they vividly catch a character: \"Too chattery chittery at first go off; lean as a rake, wispy; & frittered. Some flimsy smartness & taint of the flimsy glittery literary about her: but this was partly nerves, I think; & she felt us alien & observant doubtless.\" As well she might. But the chittery, flimsy, frittered image Woolf was trying for was something [Rose Macaulay] was conscious of too. She was sardonic herself about the \"flimsy\" world of popular fiction and journalism. Her edgy, comic novel Potterism , a big hit in 1920, attacked the sentimental rhetoric of mass journalism and romantic fiction. A later novel, Keeping Up Appearances , mocked the \"degraded activities\" of a money- spinning novelist. Sharp-eyed and unself-deceiving, Macaulay probably knew that most of what she wrote would be forgotten. She is read now, if at all, for her haunting post-war novel, The World My Wilderness , for two excellent travel books, They Went to Portugal and Fabled Shore (on Spain), and her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond , partly set in Turkey, with a memorable priest, Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, and a splendid and much-quoted first sentence: \" 'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.\" That opposition between secret anarchy and public responsibility is an underlying theme of Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness , which had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in postwar London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself (her own home was bombed and she lost all her books) and for Europe. Macaulay's memory of her free childhood in Italy is reflected in the half-wild character of the young girl, Barbary, who - sent to England to be \"civilised\", for complicated family reasons - finds her true home among the ruins. Romantic and didactic though this novel is, it has a strong atmosphere (it would make a good film), comparable to - and surely influenced by - [Elizabeth Bowen]'s The Death of the Heart

He ministered with equal success in Knowle, Bristol, in the Potteries, at St Anne's Soho, Earls Court, and finally at St Matthew's, Westminster, which he enjoyed rebuilding in stunning baroque style after a fire. How was this done? Hospitality is part of the answer, and especially his Sunday teas at St Cuthbert's; on one occasion Arthur Macmillan, brother of the Prime Minister, was surprised to find himself with a group of topless dancers. One of the joys of visiting him was the furnishing: Anthony Powell, in his Journals, writes of going to lunch at St Matthew's: \"The clergy house was somewhere between a Firbank novel and Cruikshank's illustrations of The Old Curiosity Shop.\" [Rose Macaulay] wrote of him: \"a clever young prophet, very good company too.\" Like Macaulay, Irvine supported the ordination of women. In retirement Irvine spent happy years in Brighton, involved in his local parish church and living with his sister Rosemary, with whom he had a lifelong friendship, though their careers sometimes took them apart.

Your list omitted Rose Macaulay's marvellous The Towers of Trebizond - one of my very favourite novels. \"'Take my camel dear,'...