91. Rose Macaulay — What Not with Kate Macdonald

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AMY HELMES: Hi everybody. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast that celebrates the work of forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. Today, we're discussing a novel set in the world of civil servants, government offices, and maddening bureaucracy. 

AMY: How many people are about to hit stop on this podcast right now? But don't do it, you guys, because this novel, What Not, by Rose McCaulay is totally wild, witty, and so clever. It will have you laughing and thinking,

KIM: Yes, it will. And thinking is the operative word in this novel, which was originally published in 1918. It's set in an alternative early 20th century England, where the government has raised the stakes on trying to improve the intellect of its citizens by passing laws dictating who can marry whom and have children. government run system of eugenics, basically.

AMY: And it's a dystopian novel, and yeah, Kim, I'm starting to warm up to these, but it's written in a satirical style that is absurdly entertaining.

KIM: Yeah, it's funny on one level, but it's also deeply disturbing on another. It's thought to have possibly inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And it's also pretty easy to draw parallels between this novel and the cultural and political quagmires we're facing today. We are so lucky that we have a literary historian who actually got this book back in print joining us today to help us put it all in context.

AMY: I can't wait to introduce her, but first we're going to ask you, our listeners, to take a number and please wait while we place you on hold. We'll be back momentarily to raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Kate MacDonald, an academic and writer with a particular interest in early 20th century popular British literature and the history of publishing from that time period. She's written and edited numerous scholarly articles and books, including the first collection of scholarly essays on Macaulay. She's currently a visiting research fellow at the Oxford International Center for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. 

AMY: In addition, Kate is also bringing forgotten writers back into print through the Handheld Classics branch of the publishing company she spearheads, Handheld Press. She oversees pretty much everything from finding and commissioning books to editorial production and marketing. And I'm really interested in talking to her more about that job, as well. Kate was also a pioneer in the world of podcasting about forgotten books. She has retired that podcast, but she's still writing book reviews, which you can find over on her website, Katemcdonald.net. Kate, welcome to the show.

KATE MACDONALD: Glad to be here. Thank you for asking me.

AMY: Okay. So when it comes to today's lost lady, Rose Macaulay. I hadn't previously read anything by her, but Kim, I know you've read at least one of her books. Her name, however, is one that tends to pop up on my radar a lot. And I think maybe that's because during the first half of the 20th century, she wrote a lot: 23 novels, as well as poetry and scads of non-fiction. So Kate, I'm wondering where you actually think Macaulay falls in this scale of "lost," and do you remember how you were introduced to her?

KATE: Okay, well, I think she is a lot less lost now than she was about 10 years ago, but at that stage, very few people had heard of her unless they had read the old Virago reprints of some of her novels. Now Virago Press didn't reprint everything. They just did a few. And then another couple of publishers did reprints, but those novels had not been reissued since the 1980s. So we're talking a good 30 years, which is a generation, you know. That's fairly lost. I cannot now remember when I first started reading Rose McCaulay, but it was probably in my early twenties, and I'm pretty sure it was her most famous novel, The Towers of Trebizond, which is the one that really brought her a huge amount of fame, but it was also her last novel. I got into Rose Macaulay more because I wanted to teach her, and I couldn't find the texts that my students could buy. And that is critical because if you're going to bring a lost author back into better knowledge, you have to have the books to give to students so they can study them So I started reading around the subject and I said, "Well, there's very little work extent on Macaulay that's been collected." So there's plenty of academic papers, but that's no good for my mum who might want to read about Macaulay. She's not an academic. So that was one of the reasons why I thought, "Well, we can put together a collection of essays." It took six years as a project to get people together, to produce the essays, and I boiled them into a book. And I wrote quite a few of myself. And now we have the first proper collection of that. There have been three biographies and a fourth one if you count it, but you don't really because it's a special category of book. The last biography was published in 2003. Um, that could do with reprinting. My company Handheld Press, we re- published a book by the biographer Sarah LeFanu about her process of writing and researching that biography. So it's kind of a biographer's journal in which you revisit Rose McCaulay's life. And you learn about her and also discover all the secrets that she had and things that were very different to what she actually said they were like, and it's a great discovery book. So Sarah LeFanu and the biographical process have helped bring Rose McCaulay back to, I think, greater popularity now. But look for her in the mainstream bookshops and you might find The Towers of Trebizond and that would be it. But as you say, she wrote well over 20 novels. Where are they? Why are they not in print? 

KIM: So we're going to be discussing What Not today. And it was actually the first bestseller for Handheld Press, is that correct? 

KATE: Yes. 

KIM: How did you find it? 

KATE: Well, I found it because when I was putting this collection of essays together, I needed to do an annotated bibliography of everything Rose Macaulay had written and also all the criticism about her. So I methodically went through old her extant books and read all the novels right from the beginning. And then I came across this title going, " What is this? I've never heard of What Not. Where's this?" Couldn't find a copy anywhere. So I had to go to the British Library, which like the Library of Congress, there are libraries in Britain where publishers have to send a copy of every book they publish. So they're called the statutory libraries. So the British Library had a copy. Terrific. I went there. You can't take the books out, you have to go visit it. And I looked at it and thought, "Well, this is amazing. It's science fiction. It's speculative, it's dystopia. I detect Aldous Huxley, and this is such a great novel. Why is this the second edition? Why isn't this the first edition?" Because at the same time, I went back to Sarah LeFanu's biography and I realized that when What Not first came out, it had been pulled pretty quickly by the publisher and a particular section of text had been rewritten because they were terrified of being taken to court because the text was potentially libelous. And I realized that the British Library only had the revised edition. And I thought, "Well, I want to see the original, where can I find it?" I could not find it. So I had no idea what that was. So four years later, I think, I was leaving academia and setting up my own company. And What Not was top of my list as a book I wanted to bring back to print because it was science fiction, because it was a work by a woman who's not known for such a thing, and because it was just so readable and so interesting and so important for the eugenics, the post first world war political angle, the love story, which is pretty good. All these things. I really, really wanted to republish it, but I wanted to do it with that missing text. And I didn't know where to find it because copies of that novel are so scarce. And I was complaining about this when I went to visit a friend of mine called John Clute, who is a good bit older than me. He is one of the, oh, I don't know, the brave new world of science fiction writers in the 1960s. He's Canadian. He now lives in London. I said, "John, Rose Macaulay and science fiction and speculative novel and tell me what you know." And he said, "Oh, I've got the first edition here." He reaches out and brings 

AMY: Oh my 

KATE: the original first edition, because he's also a book collector. It was the most exciting moment. So he showed me and said, "This is the passage," and I went, "But what are these pencil marks?" and he said, "Oh my goodness, I've never seen these." This was the copy that Rose McCaulay's publisher had and wrote on the margins of the offending pages: "Cut here, cut this." So I reinstated the missing text, I added the replacement text as a footnote, so people can see and compare. And then as the publishing process goes along, I sent the information about What Not to The Bookseller, which is a British trade magazine. And the woman who writes the column which is relevant for reprints, she emailed me saying, "I want to see a PDF of this." I said, "Oh, nice. Very exciting." I was really very naive. Sent her that. Didn't think much more of it. And then about a week and a half later, I'd just come out of the gym and my phone started jumping up and down in my bag and I'm like, "Well, what is going on?" The orders were piling in because The Guardian newspaper had got the story that we were republishing and bringing back Rose Macaulay with the novel that Aldous Huxley had plagiarized from to create Brave New World. and because The Guardian were an online newspaper, they printed the link. So everybody all over the world was busy buying the book. I had to reprint it three times before March. So that was how we got our best seller,

AMY: This is what we love to hear! We just want people to know about these authors and start reading them and I mean, you, you did it! 

KATE: It was amazing. It was just the best thing. And it got reviewed and reviewed and people bought shed loads, and it still sells quite well. And I think also because of that, um, people like British Library Publishing, they started to go, "Oh, well, Rose Mcaulay, she's clearly marketable. People want to buy her, therefore, what can we publish?" And suddenly there was a little flurry of people wanting to bring back Rose Macaulay from the backlist and make it front list again. And I think that we proved it with our edition. She's marketable. She may be a century old, but my goodness, this book will sell.

KIM: So, Kate, what do we know about Macaulay's upbringing and early life? And what was her personality like? 

KATE: Well, it's very interesting. She was part of what has been called the intellectual aristocracy of Britain, and in a way she's similar to Virginia Woolf in that the parents and the generations above, they came not from the landed aristocracy or from very rich families, but they came from families where the men all went to Oxford or Cambridge, and the women were extremely intelligent. And Rose McCaulay was the second oldest of a family of seven children. Her father was a schoolmaster. He was also a professor. When she was about six years old, the family moved to a small seaside town in Italy, near Genoa, and they lived there because it was a heck of a lot cheaper. And I think the family were a little bit straightened for money, and with seven children, you can hardly blame them. And the father was writing a book or doing something that didn't require him to be in England. So you can imagine a very small seaside town, which was still fairly populated with Italians but there were very few other English people. And so Rose grew up over the next seven years with her brothers and sisters, this tight knit, flamboyant rampaging group, doing what the family thought was normal. And it was Sarah LeFanu who said in her biography, Rose didn't actually learn what it was to be a girl. She wasn't restricted by the Victorian conventions, or then the Edwardian conventions of how young girls ought to behave. So when the family came back to England, when her father had a professorship, suddenly Rose McCaulay was forced to learn how to behave correctly. And I think that colored her attitude to how she ought to behave in social situations ever after. So she went to Oxford high school and eventually she went to university at Oxford at Somerville College. Now these were the days where girls could go to university and even if they passed the exams for a degree, they certainly weren't awarded a degree. That did not happen until the early 1920s. And she studied history. She had a happy university life. She had friends. Some of them, she kept all her life. But in the end, she didn't take her final exams because we think she suffered a nervous breakdown and I think that was a sore point for her, for the rest of her life, because she was intellectually very, very able, but she didn't have a degree. So she went back home, and her father then got a job in Wales. So they had to move to Wales, and she started writing novels. Her sixth novel was, and I will say casually her sixth novel... She just wrote novels and they got published. And then the sixth novel won a prize and the prize was absolutely massive. It was about 75,000 pounds, nearly a hundred thousand dollars. It made her financially independent. And by this time she was in her mid twenties. And so she instantly moved to London, and for a precious two years, she mixed with people her own age and younger. So she mingled with these poets, artists, intellectuals, and then the war happened. So she moved back with her mother. Her mother was living in Cambridgeshire. She went to volunteer as a nurse. Absolutely hated it because she couldn't really cope with blood, so she gave up on the nursing and then she wrote a novel called Non-Combatants and Others, which was her eighth novel. And this is the one that really brought her. Into mainstream literature, and this was in her mid thirties and it's the first pacifist novel to be published in Britain during the First World War, and it's a stupendous work of art. I could talk about that for ages. And then January, 1917, she began work as a civil servant. First in the particular branch of the Ministry of War called The War Office, which examined applications for exemption from military service. So these are conscientious objectors. This is something she had written about in Non-Combatants and Others. So that was an interesting parallel. And I think at some point she also worked in the Ministry of Information, which is where she met Gerald O'Donovan. Now Rose is about 37, 38, at this point. Gerald O'Donovan is an ex Roman Catholic priest. He left the priesthood in about 1908 in Ireland. He married, he had two children and he and Rose fell in love and they had a secret passionate affair which lasted until the end of his life in 1942. And almost nobody knew about it. And when you read What Not, you'll think, "Ooh! Parallel!" There's a lot in What Not about the heady, emotional rush of falling in love when you know you're not supposed to, when social and legal barriers are in your way and you can't do anything about it. You're just in love and whoosh. There's a lot there to choose from. 

KIM: Yeah. So let's talk some more about her time working for the government during WWI, because that relates directly to the novel as well as this affair that we're talking about too. She actually dedicates the book "To all the civil servants I have known." Why might she have been inspired to write a novel set in this world of government bureaucracy? 

KATE: Um, probably because she found it completely ridiculous. The civil servants she is writing about in What Not belong to The Ministry of Brains. So she invented an entirely new department. Rose Macaulay clearly found the way people had to behave and the rules and regulations quite ridiculous. But I think her satire was really aimed at government departments trying to control people's lives and emotions. That's what she's getting at really. You know, she had a great friend called Marjorie Grant who we've also just published, who wrote a novel from 1921 about women civil servants working at the end of the war and about how they managed to make the life of a single young woman working in London. It's called Latchkey Ladies. And Marjorie was clearly drawing on the background that she and Rose together had experienced when they were working in offices in London. So it's not just, this is a target for satire. This is a target for criticism. It's just, this is what life was like. And for many, many women, it was really quite a new kind of life because it was only in the war when the men were all fighting that the women were allowed into these offices to hold these positions of responsibility, to make decisions that men had to abide by, and that's really quite exciting. 

AMY: Okay. So to summarize the basic premise of this novel, we have two single young career women. One is Kitty Grammont and the other is Ivy Delmer. They are both working for The Ministry of Brains, the department you described Kate. It's dedicated to increasing the average intelligence of England's citizens in the hopes of preventing another world war. And as part of the Mental Progress Act, people are classified according to their intellectual level. And so they can only get married or have children with people who are in the correct category for their classification. Now, if you follow the regulations, you will receive payment for your progeny, but if you break the rules, you have to pay sometimes insurmountable fines on these unsanctioned children that you might have.

KIM: Right. So as a result, many babies end up being abandoned at birth on church doorsteps, or even left to die. Anyone deemed to have deficiencies is prohibited from marrying or having children altogether. So the character of Ivy is an underling at The Ministry of Brains, but Kitty has a more important job in The Propaganda Department trying to convince society to go along with the government's outlandish edicts for the common good. Both women spend their off time visiting family in the village of Little Chantreys, where we get to see how everyday citizens are coping with and reacting to these government policies. Kate, can you give our listeners some historical context in terms of issues of the day that Macaulay was reacting to?

KATE: Okay, I'll do my best. Um, the first thing to remember is that the world was emerging from an exhausting appalling war, as well as the Spanish Flu epidemic. That level of death and destruction had not been seen for decades. So the economy is staggering, politics was in a foment, which is normal after war because everybody wants to get rid of the old faces and get the new ones in. Eugenics is part of what The Ministry of Brains was trying to do, to manipulate the population by breeding out those qualities which it deemed to be unfit. People with lower mental capacities, that's what The Ministry of Brains was targeting. The eugenics movement in Britain and in the USA was the target of Macaulay's very dark satire. Now the USA had enforced sterilization at this point in several states. Britain never went that far, but there was a small and vocal eugenecist movement which was advocating for banning people with lower mental capacity to breed. So that's a sort of a right- wing movement to control the populations through eugenics. At the same time in Britain, you have a pretty long history of radical left politics, which want to give contraception to the working poor to allow them to pull themselves up economically and not be burdened by large families they can't support. So in a really weird way, at the end of the First World War, you've got a policy of controlling and manipulating how people can have children which is being supported by lots of different political colors. It's a really odd moment. So this is the background to what McCaulay was writing against. 

KIM: Um, we would love it. If you would like to read a passage from What Not to give our listeners a feel for how the book sounds. 

KATE: Okay. So I'm going to read a passage which is about a London tube train. It's the Bakerloo line, and this is the line that Kitty Grammont and Ivy Delmer take when they get off their commuter train that lands at Marylebone and they get from the Bakerloo line and go to the center. 

The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred young men, brown and fit young men, bored and blase young men, jolly and amused the young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage, the set of their shoulders. 

There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping, impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking in their cost, their cut,  their colour. This was an engrossing occupation. Those who practice it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn or a paper, and merely look all over, up and down, shoes to hat... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type and the Bakerloo this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. It would take something more than a great war, something more even than a food crisis, to leave its mark on these sphinx-like and immobile countenances. Kingdoms may rise and fall ,nations may reel in the death-grapple, but they sit gazing still, and their minds, amid the rocking chaos, may be imagined to be framing some such thoughts as these: "Those are nice shoes. I wonder if they're the ones Swan and Edgar have at 30 shillings. She's trimmed her hat herself, and not, well. That skirt is last year's shape. That's a smart coat. Dear me, what stockings; you'd think anyone would be ashamed. These women had not the air of reckless anticipation, of being alert for any happening, however queer, that, in differing degrees, marked the majority of people in those days. For that, in many, seemed the prevailing note; a series of events so surprising as to kill surprise, of disasters so appalling as to numb horror, had come and gone, leaving behind them this reckless touch, and with it a kind of greed, a determination to snatch whatever might be from life before it tumbled again into chaos.

KIM: I was hoping you would read from that part. It's such a great way to set up what's going on here, showing it in the microcosm of this little car in the train. 

KATE: And it's so modern. This is modern transportation that we have today. Every one of us listening has sat in a train, and thought, "What's she got that on for?" Or "Where'd she get those shoes from?" It's just so human. 

KIM: Yes. 

KATE: And it's a hundred years old. It's fabulous.

AMY: And this idea of, "Okay, we got through that war." The Ministry of Brains, what they're trying to do is make sure that society never has to go through that again, ironically, because we know that they will be having to.

KATE: Yeah. 

AMY: As we get into the book we're dealing with these unwanted babies and controlling who can have babies with whom. The satirical tone of all that reminded me a lot of Jonathan Swift's essay, "A Modest Proposal." I don't know if either of you guys are familiar with that.

KATE: I am not. I know Swift, but I'd never read that one.

AMY: Okay. He wrote an essay that was his idea of solving poverty in Ireland. And he was like, "I have a great idea, guys. We need to just start eating Irish babies. Let's turn them into delicacies." Just the way she approaches, it reminds me of his version of satire. 

KATE: What's interesting is that Sarah Lonsdale, in the introduction to our edition, she points out that Macaulay pulls the reader along with her along this logical train of thinking. Well, of course, if we're going to stop people breeding, we have to have a penalty. Then what happens to the babies? Well, they die. And this is slipped past the readers' consciousness. You're going nod, nod. Yeah. Whoa!!! Wait a minute. 

KIM: Yes. exactly. 

KATE: It's so clever.

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: She's messing with you a little bit, because I did find myself wishing at times, you know, especially around election time, if we just had a smarter, more educated base of voters, this would solve a lot of our problems. So, Macaulay's criticizing government overreach, but she also is kind of poking fun at the idiocy of the common man in certain places, too. 

KATE: Yeah.

AMY: And Lonsdale, in the introduction, she says that "Macaulay's refusal to come down on one side or the other forces the reader to work hard at asking what their own viewpoint is." The characters in What Not do this as well. So it seems like a lot of the civilians are willing to go along with it, right? They're fine with it until it gets to the point where it actually impacts them. And therein lies the problem. 

KIM: Yes, exactly. And to that point, Kitty ends up having an affair with her boss. He's the Minister of Brains, a man named Nicholas Chester. And it's not just the fact that he's such a high-ranking public official that makes their relationship verboten. It's the fact that Nicholas is classified as "uncertified" due to his family background. He's not supposed to marry or have children with anyone, even though he is very intelligent himself. But Kitty and Nicholas are madly in love, and this leaves them in a quandary. Do they or do they not flout the very rules they are touting and expecting everyone else to follow?

AMY: And yeah, while I was prepping this episode, I see the headline in the news that Boris Johnson, prime minister for England, is issued a fine for breaking the lockdown rules during the pandemic. Instantly I thought of Nicholas Chester you know? The rules are for everyone but the people in charge. And of course we have politicians here in the United States who have been caught for similar sort of hypocrisy. Um, but in terms of Kitty and Nicholas having their unsanctioned affair, that gets us back to Rose Macaulay and what did you say his name was? 

KATE: Gerald O'Donovan.

AMY: Okay. Which we already kind of touched on a little bit, um, but I don't know if you have anything further to say.

KATE: Well, the thing is, Gerald O'Donovan's wife really liked Rose, and Rose was frequently a guest at their home. She became a godmother to one of their daughters. I have no idea how Beryl O'Donovan did not realize what was going on. Um, Gerald O'Donovan and Rose went on holidays together in Britain and abroad. So they carried on their relationship discreetly. She had her own flat in Marylebone and he could visit any time he wanted. She didn't have a servant on the premises. That meant that Gerald could come and visit Rose and stay overnight. And in her last novel, which was written long after Gerald had died, one of the subplots is that the narrator is in love with someone else who is married and it's a secret affair and then something dreadful happens at the end. And Rose is purely torturing herself with a reenactment of what she went through. Yeah, it's structured her life, this relationship.

AMY: It seems like some of her friends were shocked to hear about it after the fact. A lot of people painted her with, like, the spinster brush?

KATE: She did not look like a mistress. She was a stick insect. She was tall and skinny, not particularly pretty. She wasn't voluptuous. She wasn't a physically sensual sort of person in her appearance. Rose confided to possibly her closest sister and possibly also to a cousin, but until she died, nobody in her wider circle of friends knew that she'd had this long standing affair for about 20 years, except a Anglican priest who lived in the States, with whom she set up a correspondence in the last two or three years of her life. Because she was a really devoted Anglo-Catholic high church, and when she began the affair with Gerald O'Donovan, she decided she couldn't, in good conscience, take Holy Communion. And that was a great torment to her because she believed very passionately in her religion. So after Gerald died, um, I don't know when she went back to taking communion, but as part of the correspondence with this priest, they discussed the religious aspects. He encouraged Rose to go back to church, and she reports to him her great joy and pleasure of being in the church again. And then she dies, and her biographer, who was also her literary executor, a very remarkable woman called Constance Babington Smith, she published the correspondence between Rose and the priest, with his permission, and thus the affair came to light. So when these were published a couple of years after Rose died, her literary establishment was in a furor because a Dame of British literature, Dame Rose Maaulay, to find out had this secret affair with a married man and an ex- Catholic priest. And she's a big, big name in the Anglo- Catholic community, and an Anglo- Catholic priest broke the secrets of the confession, in effect. So you've got all these taboos being broken, and then underneath all that, you've got this probably quite personal response of, "Why didn't I know? Why did not Rose, who was my great friend for years and years, why did she not ever tell me about this affair?"

KIM: Yeah. And here it is, she's been writing about it, and nobody saw it. 

KATE: Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of people were really upset, and Constance Babington Smith was really criticized for making these letters public. 

KIM: Fascinating. 

AMY: And you can see why in What Not, you know, Kitty and Nicholas are so worried about their affair coming out, because everyone would be having the same reaction that we're having right now to her affair.

KATE: Absolutely. It's such a foretelling of the thoughts and the deeply hurt feelings and the social codes being broken in all sorts of ways. So Rose knew right at the start what the stakes were. And she wrote about it in his novel, which then disappeared because of commercial reasons. I don't think she ever wanted to suppress it, but for commercial reasons, this novel did not do well. The secret of her affair was kind of buried, which is so strange.

KIM: Very strange. That's fascinating. There's so many fascinating aspects to her story. So let's talk a little bit about the influence the media plays, and it plays an important role in this novel. Um, it's a theme that Macaulay ends up diving into more in the next novel. She wrote Potterism, which is another book available from Handheld Press. We're obviously still talking about the power and influence of the media today, not to mention social media. Kate, do you want to tell us a little bit about Macaulay's particular interest in this subject? 

KATE: Well, even in 1916, she was writing very critically about the media, so in Non-Combatants and Others in 1916, her pacifist novel, she is really concerned about the way the wartime newspapers and the Defense of the Realm Act, which was the censorship law if you like, we're controlling the way people responded to the war and how news about the war was being disseminated. In What Not, the newspapers get hold of the story about Chester and Grammont. And this is what the libelous passages were about, because in the novel, a tabloid editor goes to see Nicholas Chester in his home and says, "Okay, I know you're having an affair, admit it," and Chester doesn't. But the reason why the publisher got very worried about this section was that it takes the view that this is what the tabloid newspapers do all the time: they blackmail people. And this was liable. Um, and also at the time there were two very, very important newspaper magnates in Britain who would have taken immediate offense, and they had a huge amount of money and could have completely sued this publishing company too high heavens. So that's why the passages were pulled. So Macaulay makes the power of the press not only an agent of truth, but also an agent of manipulation the same way the Ministry of Brains is an agent of manipulation. The press is not necessarily the bad guy. In a way the press is doing the right thing by revealing hypocrisy by a public figure. But it's also doing a terrible thing to two human beings who just want to love and be happy. So you've got two sides there and this is Macaulay absolutely through and through. She does not take a side. She says this and then there's that, and you decide. You can make the decision, because I'm just going to give you the facts. 

AMY: And she almost has like an anthropologist's point of view in how she's sort of dissecting what sorts of people read what sorts of publications. 

KATE: Yeah. 

AMY: But my favorite was Stop It. A magazine called Stop It, which I honestly, if we could just have one newspaper that would put everybody in their place, like, "Stop it, stop it with that." Um, yeah, I think that's brilliant.

KIM: Me too. I love that. So can you talk to us a little bit more about how this book is said to have possibly influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? 

KATE: So Brave New World was published 14 years after What Not. Um, and Aldous Huxley uses a system of classifying people by grade that reflects their intelligence and also the nutrients they were given in their test tubes. This grade is bad. This grade is good, and so on. And each grade are given different brainwashing routines, if you like. So he uses alpha double to Epsilon minus; that's his different grades. And those are Greek letters. Rose Macaulay uses a similar grade, but she just goes A to C3. That's one of the big similarities between the two novels. Other interesting facts: Huxley was a friend of Rose Macaulay, and at the end of the war, she was renting a room in her friend Naomi Royde-Smith's house. So they have lots of parties. Aldous Huxley went to those parties while Rose was writing What Not. So that's circumstantial evidence. Huxley also uses Rose's mind training program that citizens are obliged to go and do by the Ministry of Brains, whereas Huxley creates his as emotional engineering. So he uses the idea of the population are obliged to go through propagandistic training in both novels. The societies are controlled by a shadowy elite. Rose has, um, a United Council, which takes the place of all the governments of the world. And Huxley has the World Controllers. So that was interesting. He's pinched quite a lot. And he did not acknowledge Rose in the slightest. George Orwell is routinely trotted out as someone who was also influenced by What Not. Personally, I cannot see it. But Orwell had probably read it and maybe he enjoyed it. Maybe he pinched an idea and then reworked it massively. In literature, ideas get recycled all the time, and it's quite dangerous to say, "this must be a completely different thing from that," or "this must be a borrowing from this." It's more useful to say, "Well, what did they do with it?"

AMY: Yeah, that makes sense. You can see how different people would kind of come to the same conclusions about government. Um, which brings me to my next point, which is the fact that she wrote this before the rise of fascism and Nazi-ism, it makes you realize, she was kind of prescient, and she even says in her kind of forward to the book, she said, "I'm not trying to make predictions, I'm making suggestions." 

KATE: Yeah, it was way too early to predict anything like National Socialism or fascism, but she wasn't stupid. She was politically very astute and she knew about the patterns of history. One of her forebears, I think her grandfather or great-grandfather was Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was one of the greatest historians Britain had. So she would have been brought up not only on the legend of her grandfather Macaulay, but she would have read his histories. And she studied history at university, so she knew about the patterns of political movements and the way that, you know, empires rose and fell. And she could not possibly predict fascism, but I think she could predict that something bad's going to happen, because we've been through one cataclysm and Germany's in a really, really bad way. And economic devastation is going to lead to really bad politics. I think that's what she might've assumed.

AMY: Right. The idea of we're in a vacuum now, and something has to fill the vacuum and yeah.

KATE: Hmm. 

KIM: Macaulay's final novel is widely considered to be her masterpiece. It's called The Towers of Trebizond, and it examines the conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the Christian faith. Ding, ding! It goes right back to what you were saying earlier about Rose Macaulay. Now that I know about her own affair, the subject matter for this book  Towers of Trebizond, um, it becomes an even more interesting choice for her. The narrator in that one is a woman who travels with a group of people, including, uh, the narrator's Aunt Dot, who is supposedly based on Macaulay's friend, Dorothy L. Sayers. And they go to Istanbul, and it won the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1956. It's a madcap farce. It's very smart and very funny.

AMY: And then a year later in 1957, McCauley was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Um, she died at the age of 77, however, the following year. And incidentally Macaulay was acquainted for decades, I think, with the author, Rosamond Lehmann whom we did an episode on last year. And I read that Lehmann apparently had thrown Rose a little celebration party after she was appointed Dame or however you call that. 

KATE: When she received her damehood, I think 

AMY: When she received her damehood. Okay. but it does sound like they were maybe kind of frenemies. And this goes back to the fact that Rose Macaulay had written a not completely unkind, but not glowing review of Dusty Answer decades earlier. In that review, she said "the only question, Judith, who is the main character of Dusty Answer asked of life was 'does he or she love me?'" And given how many big, important meaning-of-life questions Rose is asking in her novels, you can kind of understand where she would have had that criticism.

KIM: I guess if she took it that way though, I felt like there was a lot more going on there then I guess Rose Macaulay. 

AMY: Well, but I mean, Rosamond's books definitely did not have the scope of, you know, it was a love story at the end of the day. 

KATE: Yeah. 13 years is a long time to carry a grudge for a slightly critical review.

AMY: Maybe they got over it. Like I said, she threw her a party, so... 

KIM: It reminds me of, uh, Mary Taylor. She was friends with Charlotte Bronte and rebuked her for not having a doctrine to preach in Jane Eyre. She thought Jane Eyre was too light. 

KATE: This is one of the reasons I like Rose Macaulay so much is that emotional attachments are strong for her, but her novels are never just about a woman sitting at home being vulnerable because she's not married. They're about far more: social history. There are intellectual questions. There are problems about human behavior and the way society is made up. And what can we do about changing it to make it better? So much more is happening. She took her fiction seriously. It wasn't campaigning literature; she wanted it to entertain, it's always enjoyable. And she exercises her wit and her very dry humor a lot in her novels, but it's never just about romance. 

KIM: We wanted to find out how things are going over at handheld Press. We're so fascinated with what you're doing there. Is there anything specific that you look for when you're deciding whether or not to bring back a lost book?

KATE: Um, the first criteria is I have to absolutely love it. The second criterion is I have to think it will sell. And many of Rose Macaulay's novels I don't think will sell so that's why I haven't brought them out. Because we can't afford to have a dud. We can't afford to print a book, especially with paper prices absolutely rocketing at the moment, so we have to be very careful. I'm also very interested in the kind of books that aren't supposed to be written. So Rose Macaulay writing science fiction. She did it once, with What Not; didn't do it ever again. I find that really interesting. We published a book by Margaret Kennedy who was a very well-respected playwright and novelist, but during the Second World War she wrote a memoir in 1940 from her diaries. And at that time, nobody knew if Britain was going to be invaded by Germany. So she sent this memoir to the States and it was published by Yale University Press and then promptly vanished from sight and was never published in Britain. And we republished it, and that helped bring Margaret Kennedy back into fashion last year. I love to publish discoveries that people have completely forgotten. So in November, we're bringing out two books by the Welsh writer John Llewellyn Rhys who died in the war, Second World War, at the age of 29, having written two novels. His widow put together a collection of short stories that he had already written. It won a prize, and then he vanished from sight. Nobody knew about his books. They're really hard to get hold of, but we're bringing out all his works in two volumes in November, and they're just amazing. You've heard of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry? John Llewellyn Rhys is the British de Saint-Exupery. He is an absolute discovery. I could not be more excited about him. So that's what we're doing in November. I mentioned Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant, which is a 1921 novel about single women living and working in London and exploring their new social and economic freedoms, but also running the risk that every woman runs: getting pregnant. And somebody gets pregnant. And that got such a great review in The British Times, it's done really well. Next week, well, in May we publish a lost Australian writer, Helen de Guerry Simpson. Supernatural short stories. We do a lot of classic supernatural short story anthologies. Our first collection was called Women's Weird and its successor was Women's Weird II. And then we're producing single collections by some of the writers from those anthologies. We publish about six, seven books a year. And in June, on June 10th, we will be five years old, which feels amazing.

AMY: And how many books have you released in those five years?

KATE: We will by then have published 31.

KIM: That's incredible. 

AMY: It sounds like a lot of work, but I can imagine you must love it.

KATE: I do. It's the best job I've ever had.

AMY: That's amazing. And I just love that you're bringing us all these wonderful writers that we wouldn't have known about. I can't wait to read some more. And we also hope that maybe you'll come back again and join us to talk about them in the future.

KATE: I would be delighted. That would be really nice. This has been such fun. Thank you so much for asking me to take part.

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. 

KIM: And as always, you can check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of the show and further information.

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.