Rose Macaulay | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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The Towers of Trebizond, [70] 31; The World My Wilderness, [75] 41

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An Uneasy Peace

Anne Boston on Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

The World My Wilderness strikes me as an instance of fiction that reveals as much about time and place as bald historical facts. The novel is set in 1946, when countries, societies and most of all individuals are forced to adjust from a state of total war to an uneasy peace. Treachery, betrayal, death have cast long shadows; families or couples separated for years meet across chasms of national and personal difference. Morals are twisted and corrupted; everyone is compromised by their character, circumstances and reactions to where they find themselves, which is rarely where they thought they were. The narrative is dark, complex and subtle, with much crucial information implied obliquely or imparted as it were off-screen.

The Shining City

Amanda Theunissen on Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond

Picture the scene: a heavyweight London literary event in the 1930s. Two well-known women novelists, chatting. ‘My novels won’t live, Ivy,’ says Rose Macaulay to Ivy Compton-Burnett. ‘Yours may.’

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