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‘Oh Dear, if Only the Reformation had Happened Differently’: Anglicanism, the Reformation and Dame Rose Macaulay (1881–1958)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
‘Take my camel, dear’, said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
Thus begins, with one of the most memorable opening sentences in twentieth-century Anglophone fiction, Dame Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond. It is now largely seen as a somewhat quirky ‘niche novel’ for Anglican aunts or a perfect present for the diminishing number of ordinands with historical and literary interests. In fact, Trebizond was a transatlantic literary sensation, a best-seller as well as a critical success. It won Macaulay the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was no doubt partly responsible for her being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.
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References
1 Macaulay, Rose, The Towers of Trebizond (London, 1995; first publ. 1956), 3.Google Scholar I am grateful to Diarmaid MacCulloch, Gillian Sutherland and William Whyte for their comments on this essay.
2 Emery, Jane, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (London, 1991), 317–18 Google Scholar; Bensen, Alice R., Rose Macaulay (New York, 1969), 154–5, 158–9.Google Scholar
3 Waller, Philip, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford, 2006), 673.Google Scholar
4 Annan, Noel, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Treuelyan, ed. Plumb, J. H. (London, 1955), 254–60.Google Scholar For an assessment of Annan, see Whyte, William, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited’, Journal of Victorian Studies 10 (2005), 15–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the fuller genealogy provided in Constance Babington Smith, Rose Macaulay (London, 1972), 237.
5 Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), 140–5, 311–16.Google Scholar I am grateful to William Whyte for making this point to me. Women, not simply Macaulay are greatly under-represented in Absent Minds.
6 Macaulay, Trebizond, 3.
7 Rowell, Geoffrey, Stevenson, Kenneth and Williams, Rowan, eds, Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford, 2001).Google Scholar
8 There are a few examples of engagement with the significance of Macaulay’s Anglicanism in her fiction and non-fiction: Stewart, Douglas, The Ark of God: Studies in Five Modern Novelists (London, 1961)Google Scholar; Hein, David, ‘Faith and Doubt in Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond’, AThR 88 (2006), 47–68.Google Scholar
9 O’Donovan’s most successful novel was his first, Father Ralph (1913), a critique of the state of the Irish Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For O’Donovan’s literary career, see Candy, Catherine, Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early Twentieth Century (Dublin, 1995)Google Scholar. Candy is oddly coy about the nature of the relationship between Macaulay and O’Donovan: ibid. 64 (I am grateful to Sheridan Gilley for this reference). See also ODNB, s.n. ‘O’Donovan, Gerald (1871–1942)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/62954>, accessed 18 July 2010.
10 Smith, Babington, Macaulay, 105 Google Scholar; Emery, , Macaulay, 184, 190–3, 269–70.Google Scholar For Macaulay’s relationship with her goddaughter, see Letters to a Friend, 1950–1952, ed. Constance Babington Smith (London, 1961), 143,149, 297; Macaulay, Rose, Last Letters to a Friend, 1952–1958, ed. Smith, Constance Babington (London, 1963), 22, 118–19, 126–7, 129, 130, 132, 137, 199, 205, 208–9 Google Scholar; Smith, Babington, Macaulay, 159, 201–2, 209.Google Scholar
11 Laurie’s lover is killed in a car accident while she is at the wheel; O’Donovan was severely injured in a car accident in which Macaulay was driving in 1939. He never fully recovered, though in the end he died of cancer in 1942. In an earlier novel, Told by an Idiot (1923), the autobiographical protagonist Rome is also involved with a married man: A. N. Wilson, ‘Introduction’ to Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot (London, 1983), x; Emery, Macaulay, 256–7; ODNB, s.n. ‘O’Donovan, Gerald’. Macaulay was apparendy a notoriously bad driver: Plomer, William, ‘The Pleasures of Knowing Rose Macaulay’, in Smith, Babington, Macaulay, 234–5.Google Scholar
12 Macaulay, , Trebizond, 276–7.Google Scholar
13 Cited in Smith, Babington, Macaulay, 195–6.Google Scholar
14 Ibid. 194–5.
15 ODNB, s.n. ‘Macaulay, Rose (1881–1958)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34668>, accessed 15 July 2010. For her relationship with Johnson, see Emery, Macaulay, 298–305.
16 ‘Rose Macaulay: Letters to a Priest’, The Observer, 15 October 1961.
17 See Babington Smith’s letter to the New York Times explaining her motives in publishing the letters (29 January 1962): Cambridge, Trinity College Archives [hereafter TCC], ERM 13/195. Babington Smith undertook extensive consultation with individuals mentioned in Macaulay’s letters before publication: TCC, ERM 13, 14.
18 ‘Did this Priest Betray this Woman?’, Daily Mail, 12 October 1961.
19 TCC, ERM 13/96, 97, Letters to Babington Smith from E. M. Forster, 11, 14 October 1961.
20 ‘The Joyous Faith of Rose Macaulay’, The Observer, 22 October 1961; ‘The Way Back’, The Listener, 26 October 1961; ‘Soul of Gossip’, The Spectator, 27 October 1961.
21 TCC, ERM 13/116, 24 October 1961. For a discussion of the controversy over publication of the letters, see Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay (London, 2003), 279–96.
22 20 August 1952: Macaulay, Letters to a Friend, 345.
23 Macaulay, Rose, Letters to a Sister, ed. Smith, Constance Babington (London, 1964), 202–3 Google Scholar (probable date 24 September 1956); Emery, Macaulay, 317.
24 Macaulay, , Letters to a Friend, 40 (15 December 1950)Google Scholar; see also 169–70.
25 Bossy, John, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 153–71.Google Scholar
26 Macaulay, , Trebizond, 4–5.Google Scholar
27 On the ‘Long Reformation’, see, e.g., Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Introduction’ to idem, ed., England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), 1–32; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, JBS 30 (1991), 1–19, at 3–5 (repr. in A. Pettegree, ed., The Reformation: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 4 vols (London, 2004), vol. 2). I explore these issues more fully in ‘“Neither too mean / nor yet too gay”? The Historians, Anglicanism and George Herbert’s Church’, in Christopher Hodgkins, ed., George Herbert’s Trauels: International Print and Cultural Legacies (Newark, DE, 2011), 27–55.
28 For a view of this eccentric mindset, see Yelton, Michael, Anglican Papalism: A History 1900–1960 (Norwich, 2005), 1–19.Google Scholar
29 Macaulay, , Last Letters, 128 (5 December 1953).Google Scholar
30 Ibid. 107 (30 July 1953).
31 Macaulay, Rose, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (London, 1931), 66, 84–5, 85 respectivelyGoogle Scholar. I discuss some of these themes more fully in relation to Macaulay’s views on George Herbert in ‘“Neither too mean/nor yet too gay”?’.
32 Plomer, ‘The Way Back’. Macaulay and Plomer often appeared together on the BBC radio programme ‘The Critics’. Plomer, a poet and novelist who is best remem bered for the four librettos he produced in collaboration with Benjamin Britten, also returned to the communion of the Church of England in later life: ODNB, s.n. ‘Plomer, William (1903–1973)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31556>, accessed 19 July 2010.
33 Smith, ‘Soul of Gossip’.
34 Illtud Evans, review of Letters to a Friend, New Blackfriars, no. 499 (January 1962), 41–2.
35 Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992, 2nd edn 2005), 503 Google Scholar; MacCulloch, ‘Myth of the English Reformation’, 12–14. For recent assessments of the historiography of the impact of the Reformation, see Marshall, Peter, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, JBS 48 (2009), 564–86 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryrie, Alec, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485–1603 (London, 2009), 147–204 Google Scholar; Maltby, ‘“Neither too mean/nor yet too gay”?’.
36 TCC, ERM 8/10, Rose Macaulay, ‘Image and Sacrament: Final Version of talk to be given in Cambridge Nov. 1958’, 3. It is not clear whether this unpublished talk was delivered or not and it appears never to have been published. Macaulay died suddenly the following month.
37 Macaulay, Some Religious Elements.
38 Macaulay’s appreciation of rural English church architecture, however, is shown in her charming essay, ‘A Church I Should Like’, St Paul’s Review, May 1929, 12–14.
39 Williams, Rowan, ‘Religious Experience in the Era of Reform’, in Byrne, Peter and Houlden, Leslie, eds, Companion Encyclopedia of Theology (London, 1995), 576–93 Google Scholar, at 576.
40 Macaulay, ‘Image and Sacrament’, 5.
41 Ibid. For Macaulay’s superb treatment of the Thirty-Nine Articles, see Trebizond, 227–34. I am grateful to Gregory Seach for reminding me of the importance of this passage.
42 Herbert, George, ‘The H. Communion’, in Wilcox, Helen, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, 2007), 8–9 Google Scholar; see also ibid. 10–12. For Macaulay, Herbert was the first fully ‘Anglican’ poet: Some Religious Elements, 97–8.
43 Macaulay, ‘Image and Sacrament’, 5.
44 Evans, review of Letters to a Friend, 41–2.
45 Macaulay, ‘Image and Sacrament’, 5.