Macaulay, Dame Emilie Rose

(1881-1958)

   Born at Rugby, Warwickshire, she was the daughter of an assistant master at Rugby School (later a lecturer in English at Cambridge) and related to the historian Lord Macaulay (see entry). Educated mainly by her parents while they lived in Italy, she read history at Somerville College, Oxford. For nearly three years during World War II she served as a voluntary part-time ambulance driver in London. Cambridge University conferred an honorary doctor of literature upon her in 1951 and in 1958 she was appointed Dame of the British Empire. Severe periods of depression colored her novels. She died in London. Her earliest published writings were poems entered for competitions in the Westminster Gazette. She was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956). In a writing career that covered the first fifty years of the twentieth century, she produced twenty-three novels, six books of criticism, four books of travel and history, as well as a large correspondence and two collections of poetry: The Two Blind Countries (1914) and Three Days (1919). Some of her poems: "Many Sisters to Many Brothers," "Picnic," "The Shadow."

   Sources: Biography of Dame Rose Macaulay, by Sarah La Fanue. Guardian Unlimited Books, Review (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,975703,00.html). Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Never Such Innocence: A New Anthology of Great War Verse. Martin Stephen, ed. Buchan and Enright, 1988. Scars upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War. Catherine W Reilly, ed. Virago Press, 1981. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.