U.S. PRAISE FOR PROSE FROM ROSE

The highly reputed American books magazine The Bloomsbury Review recently carried an enthusiastic response to our republication of Rose Macaulay's The Non-combatants and Others. The Review, which enjoys a readership of some 35,000, called the book

a valuable recovery

and say that author Rose Macaulay remains significant for

incisive portraits of a society during and between the world wars.

Dame Rose Macaulay was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated at Oxford. She belongs to that noble but perhaps now undervalued tradition in British letters of writers who paid serious intellectual attention to Christian ideas and themes, and strove to weave these into their work. Macaulay had a problematic engagement with religious belief, and this was mirrored in her personal life by her affair with a former Jesuit priest. She reached the point of being able to return to the Anglican church in 1953, five years before her death.

Her strong interest in and involvement with the pacifist movement was reflected in her sponsorship of the Peace Pledge Union, and pacifism is an important element in Non-combatants, in which the heroine, Alix Sandomir’s, goes through a process of discovery, self doubt and reaffirmation of pacifist principles during the First World War.

Macaulay is responsible for what must be one of the best opening lines in literature, from The Towers of Trebizond:

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass

while a character in Staying with Relations asks:

"Is rabbit fur disgusting because it's cheap, or is it cheap because it's disgusting?"

David

MAIL AND FEMALE

Val Hennessy, champion of classic literature in her Daily Mail column, Retro Reads, reviews our edition of Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others in today's newspaper. The book explores the issues of war, pacifism and social non-conformity through the eyes of its young heroine.

Our book sits just south of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, reissued by Virago. The Virago website is a treat and a real pleasure to browse through, and Spark is one of those authors of whose works I am always meaning to read more, having enjoyed Miss Jean Brodie and The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

David

OF LOVE, WAR AND CAMELS

Later this month, we are publishing Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others, a powerful, deeply-felt novel based around the themes of war, pacifism and society during the First World War. During the War, Macaulay worked as a nurse, civil servant and then in the British Propoganda Department, although her views later led her to become a sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union in the interwar period.

Macaulay and her novel fit very well with the Capuchin mission of returning to recognition writers who, as well as being great exponents of their art, also explore unusual and important territories. Macaulay is often held up as one of the few significant twentieth century writers who were avowedly Christian and who deployed Christian themes in their writing, although her journey to faith was not a straightforward one. Macaulay's best known novel, The Towers of Trebizond, for which she won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, pits the attractions of mystical Christianity against the temptations of adulterous love, and draws heavily on her own life for its themes and content. One of the legacies bequeathed by this novel is an opening line that must rank among the most arresting in English language prose fiction:

"Take my camel, dear" said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on
her return from High Mass.

Macaulay was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1958.

David