Dame
Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (1
August 1881 – 30 October 1958) was an English writer, most noted for her
award-winning novel The Towers of
Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group
crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography,
reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs. Macaulay's novels were
partly influenced by Virginia Woolf; she also wrote biographies and
travelogues. Macaulay was born in Rugby, Warwickshire the daughter of George Campbell Macaulay, a Classical
scholar, and his wife, Grace Mary (née Conybeare). Her father was
descended in the male-line directly from the Macaulay family of Lewis. She was educated
at Oxford High School for Girls and read Modern History
at Somerville College at Oxford
University. Macaulay
began writing her first novel, Abbots Verney (published 1906),
after leaving Somerville and while living with her parents at Ty Isaf,
near Aberystwyth, in Wales. Later novels
include The Lee Shore (1912), Potterism (1920), Dangerous
Ages (1921), Told by an Idiot (1923), And No
Man's Wit (1940), The World My Wilderness (1950), and The Towers of Trebizond (1956).
Her non-fiction work includes They Went to Portugal, Catchwords
and Claptrap, a biography of John Milton,
and Pleasure of Ruins. Macaulay's fiction was influenced by
Virginia Woolf and Anatole France. During World War I Macaulay
worked in the British Propaganda Department,
after some time as a nurse and later as a civil servant in the War Office.
She pursued a romantic affair with Gerald O'Donovan, a writer and former Jesuit
priest, whom she met in 1918; the relationship lasted until his death, in 1942. During
the interwar period she was a sponsor of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union; however she resigned from
the PPU and later recanted her pacifism in 1940. Her London flat was utterly
destroyed in the Blitz, and she had to rebuild her life and
library from scratch, as documented in the semi-autobiographical short
story, Miss Anstruther's Letters, which was published in 1942. The Towers of Trebizond, her final
novel, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. Strongly autobiographical, it
treats with wistful humour and deep sadness the attractions of mystical Christianity,
and the irremediable conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the
Christian faith. For this work, she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956.[