Rose Macaulay

About this book

"In a writing career that covered the first fifty years of the twentieth century, Rose Macaulay produced twenty-three novels, six books of criticism, four books of travel and history and two collections of poetry, as well as a large correspondence. Her friends included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen." "She gave the impression of being sexually uninterested in men (she looked like a eunuch, said catty Virginia Woolf, who did not take kindly to the fact that Rose Macaulay's books were more popular than hers), while for a quarter of a century she was passionately in love with a married man. The relationship only ended with his death in 1942." "A great comic writer who excelled at satire, she was also an innovator and experimenter and a sharp and invigorating commentator on matters of popular and public interest." "This new biography captures the essence of the woman about whom Rosamond Lehmann wrote, 'To me she suggested youth, a girl, of that pure eccentric English breed which perhaps no longer exists; sexless yet not unfeminine; naive yet shrewd; and although romantic, stripped of all veils of self-interest and self-involvement.'"--Jacket.