Letters to a Friend, 1950 - 1952

by Rose Macaulay

PRE-ISBN

Letters written by Rose Macaulay to Fr Hamilton Johnson.

From the inside front dustjacket:

"Rose Macaulay first met Hamilton Johnson in 1914. At that time he was there at the London headquarters of the Cowley Fathers and they met there perhaps half a dozen times. In 1916 he was transferred to America and they lost touch, until in 1950 he happened to read a copy of her novel, “They Were Defeated”. He wrote he a fan letter: she replied. And so started a correspondence and a friendship which was to flower into the series of letters published in this volume.

It tells the story of her return, after thirty years’ estrangement, to the life of the Anglican Church. But to describe those letters as simply religious is hardly to do justice to the range of topics they discuss to or to the level at which the discussion is conducted. To Rose Macaulay the letter seems to have been a completely natural means of self-expression. On one of her letters Hamilton Johnson scribbled “spontaneous, literary, characteristic.” It is impossible to improve upon this description: their spontaneity is complete, they are literary in expression and content; and the humanity, the humour and the mind which they reflect – quickly stimulated, wide-ranging, inquisitive, learned – is so characteristic that the reader can practically catch the tone of Rose Macaulay’s voice. She writes o places and people, of books (including her own) and their authors, of ruins and bathing, of bicycling and genealogy, of punctuation and liturgy … this book is the reflection of a very remarkable woman, a memorial to her art.”

Genres: Autobiography

382 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1961

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...