In 1950, Rose Macaulay’s penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness was published by Collins; I am fortunate in
owning a first edition of this wonderful book, which I have just read for the
third time. Miss Macaulay was, in my
opinion one of England’s greatest writers of the 20th Century; a
highly-learned individual, it is fortunate for me that unlike some others, she
did not “wear her learning” too prominently – at least in her writing!
I also own a copy of her 1920s novel Told by an Idiot which too, is excellent and a copy of Jane Emery’s first-class biography of the writer; from this I should like to quote the following (by
Macaulay herself from her final novel The
Towers of Trebizond):
“And now the joy
was killed, and there seemed no reason why life too should not run down and
stop now that its mainspring was broken.
When a companionship like ours suddenly ends, it is to lose a limb or
the faculty of sight; one is quite simply cut off from life and scattered
adrift, lacking the coherence and integration of love. Life, I supposed, would proceed; I should see
my friends, go abroad, go on with my work, such as it was, but the sentient,
enjoying principle which kept it all ticking, was destroyed.”
In The Common Reader (first series) Virginia
Woolf includes an essay titled Montaigne,
in which she explains how difficult it is for the pen to express the nature of
the soul. I think that Miss Macaulay made
a good fist of it, don’t you?
Meanwhile I am searching for a copy of Miss Macaulay's The Secret River written in 1909; all I can find are first editions at around £60...
Until the next time
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