Rose Macaulay was born into an intellectual family in 1881 in Rugby. When she was six, the family moved to a small coastal village in Italy, where her father made a living as a translator of classical works and editor of textbooks. There, she developed a sense of adventure that was to be a dominant feature of her life.
Macaulay returned to Britain to be educated at Oxford, and after graduating went to London to write. She soon became one of the most popular novelists of her day and a key figure in the 1920s literary scene – swimming with Rupert Brooke, attending the farewell party for Isherwood and Auden on the eve of their departure for the Spanish Civil War, trying to teach E.M. Forster to use crutches, celebrating Christmas with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst.
Macaulay's literary output was prolific and diverse; she was the author of some thirty-nine books, mainly novels and comedies, but also poetry, essays on literature, religion and travel writing, including the excellent 'The Pleasure of Ruins', a book combining travel, archaeology and autobiography. Among her many celebrated novels of the 1920s and 1930s are Told By An Idiot, Crewe Train, The World My Wilderness and They Were Defeated. Her career culminated in her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond, which she referred to as 'my own story'. Here she managed to bring together innumerable threads of her talent, producing a novel at once funny and sad, lighthearted and deeply felt, flippant and profound.
Rose Macaulay never married. She was created Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.
