Milton

by Rose Macaulay

A study of Milton by the eminent British critic and novelist. THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED Books for College Libraries; Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.

Genres: Biography

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1873

About the author

Emilie Rose Macaulay, whom Elizabeth Bowen called "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century," was born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master. Descended on both sides from a long line of clerical ancestors, she felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill the early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville, and on coming down lived with her family first in Wales, then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There she began a writing career which was to span fifty years with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. When her sixth novel, The Lee Shore (1912), won a literary prize, a gift from her uncle allowed her to rent a tiny flat in London, and she plunged happily into London literary life.

From BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ros...

Reviews

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abandon your telephone
& invest in heavy-duty
night stand.

[Phil Mullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a gem of a small book, which had to be fetched from the storage section of our public library, published in 1935.

It is her prose, & her obvious unsentimental respect for Milton, which chiefly delights the reader. (I came to this fairly well along in my Milton year, with much dryer professorial biographies put away with relief.)

She is astringent on his attitude to women; less adulatory than Fish on the sense in which Milton intended his great poems to be a prophet's call to England to reform itself.

I find I'm rather sorry that she's likely to yellow away, like the pages of her books, as this 21st century lurches ahead.