Rose Macaulay: A Biography

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 Virginia Woolf, who did not take kindly to Rose’s novels being more popular than her own), while for a quarter of a century she was passionately involved with a married man.

A great comic writer who excelled at satire, she was also a literary innovator and experimenter, and a sharp and invigorating commentator on matters of popular and public interest.

This new eBook edition includes the ‘discursive, detailed, original’ endnotes (Independent) properly referenced for the first time and in an easy-to-use format.

This book is available on Kindle here.

For many years Sarah LeFanu was Senior Editor at The Women’s Press, and was responsible for their innovative and highly-regarded science fiction list. She has written widely on feminism and science fiction, including introductions to a number of scholarly editions of the works of Joanna Russ (The Female Man, The Two of Them, To Write Like a Woman). Sarah has also edited a range of anthologies of contemporary fiction and science fiction, including Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (with Jen Green), Letters from Home, How Maxine Loved Her Legs and Other Tales of Growing-Up, and (with Stephen Hayward) Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa.

She is the biographer of Rose Macaulay (Rose Macaulay and Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal will soon be available from SilverWood Books) and, most recently, of Samora Machel (S is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream, Hurst & Co, 2012). In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (eBook available from SilverWood Books) won the prestigious MLA Emily Toth Award.

Sarah’s short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, along with two radio plays, Thin Woman in a Morris Minor and Death Bredon. She works regularly on abridgments and dramatizations for the BBC programmes Book of the Week, Book at Bedtime and Woman’s Hour.

From 2004 to 2009 Sarah was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She continues to chair events for the LitFest on a regular basis, and also for the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

'A magnificent job … imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information … LeFanu offers a skilled visual, intellectual and emotional picture of a complex woman.'
– Diana Souhami — Independent

'A fine biography … rich and perceptive … Sarah LeFanu (is) an able and astute judge of Macaulay’s writings.'
– Miranda Seymour — Times Literary Supplement

'Sarah LeFanu’s biography glows with lively depiction of Macaulay’s idyllic childhood in Italy, her troubled twenties in Oxford and her survival through both world wars … Rose’s youthful demand that her biography be written in a "bright & popular & yet scholarly style” has been fulfilled.'
– Sunday Times

'An exhilarating book.'
– Sunday Telegraph

'Sarah LeFanu’s biography not only captures (that) essence of the woman, but the spirit of the rapidly changing times, putting Rose Macaulay’s writings and life in context, both before and after her death. Highly recommended.'
– Afric Hamilton — Irish Examiner

'The strength of Sarah LeFanu’s biography is the way it captures and animates Macaulay’s social volubility, and especially her genius for unforced gaiety, while at the same time preserving and conveying the deep vein of solitariness and melancholy that ran through her life and her work.'
– Alex Clark, — Guardian

'… a subtle, humorous and penetrating biography; much to be recommended.'
– Noonie Minogue — The Tablet