The letters in this volume were written by Rose Macaulay to her younger sister, Jean, between 1926 and her death in 1958. These were the years when she was at the height of her powers and when her reputation was spreading beyond the more limited circles which had appreciated her earlier novels. She had found in broadcasting a new medium of self-expression, she was contributing articles to the daily and weekly press, and in the literary world of those years she had become an established figure, admired, enjoyed and, by some, feared. At the same time she reacted strongly and with characteristic individuality to the political events that over-shadowed the world. All this is recorded in the correspondence with her sister who, in complete contrast, was immersed in a life of devoted personal service as a district nurse. Hence these letters to her are more than a family document, they are a commentary on her daily life and an illumination of the wider world from which her sister was...

Here is a great literary find. These letters written by Rose Macaulay to Father Hamilton Johnson, an Anglican priest, show her to have been one of the great letter-writers of this century. Rose Macaulay first met Hamilton Johnson in 1914. At that time he was 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 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 these letters as simply religious is hardly to do justice to the range of topics they discuss or to the level at which the discussion is conducted. To Rose Macaulay the letter seems to have been a completely natural...