Rose Macaulay, Gender, and Modernity

This book is the first collection on the British author Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The essays establish connections in her work between modernism and the middlebrow, show Macaulay-s attentiveness to reformulating contemporary depictions of gender in her fiction, and explore how her writing transcended and celebrated the characteristics of genre, reflecting Macaulay-s responses to modernity. The book-s focus moves from the interiorized self and the psyche-s relations with the body, to gender identity, to the role of women in society, followed by how women, and Macaulay, use language in their strategies for generic self-expression, and the environment in which Macaulay herself and her characters lived and worked. Macaulay was a particularly modern writer, embracing technology enthusiastically, and the evidence of her treatment of gender and genre reflect Macaulay-s responses to modernism, the historical novel, ruins and the relationships of history and structure, ageing, and the narra