Old Bestseller Review: Dangerous Ages, by Rose Macaulay

Old Bestseller Review: Dangerous Ages, by Rose Macaulay

a review by Rich Horton

Rose Macaulay (full name Emilie Rose Macaulay) was born in 1881. She was educated at Oxford, and turned to writing after leaving school. She wrote perhaps 20 novels, three volumes of poetry, and a good deal of nonfiction, including several memoirs. Her most famous novel by far was her last, The Towers of Trebizond. She was a Christian, of the Anglo-Catholic strain, and always struggled to reconcile her attraction to mystical Christianity with her other beliefs, and especially with her long term relationship with Gerald O'Donovan, a former Jesuit priest -- the two never married. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1957, not long before her death at the age of 77. Of her novels, The Towers of Trebizond has remained popular since its publication, but her other novels have not gotten as much attention, though more recently some of them have been reprinted, some by Virago, others (including Dangerous Ages) by the British Library. What Not, from 1918, is science fiction, and I will be reading it soon! (My copy of Dangerous Ages was a lucky find at an estate sale, a possible US first, from Boni and Liveright, no dust jacket but otherwise in probably Very Good- condition.)

Dangerous Ages appeared as Rose Macaulay turned 40. It was also just after the Great War, a time of great transition in England (and of course in all the warring countries) -- driven in part by a certain despair at the collapse of the pre-War balance of power, and relative peace, in part by mourning over lost lives, in part by an apparent feeling (shown most prominently perhaps in The Waste Land) of a failure of "civilization". This novel opens on the 43rd birthday of Neville Blendish. Neville is the wife of Rodney Blendish, a Labour politician. She is deciding to return to the medical studies she abandoned upon marriage. Now her two children, Kay and Gerda*, have grown to adulthood, so she feels she has time again, and she feels the need for an independent role now that her primary role as the children's mother is past. She doesn't want to become like her mother, Emily, who is in this novel always called Mrs. Hilary. Mrs. Hilary never did feel independent of her husband -- and when he died young she began to diminish. Neville wants to avoid a fate like her mother's -- though Mrs. Hilary is rather a stupid person, while Neville is quite intelligent -- perhaps that will be enough for her.

At this point I confess I thought the story was to be entirely about Neville, but instead it shifts and keeps shifting. It is instead a story about several generations of women in the Hilary/Blendish family: Mrs. Hilary; her mother-in-law, only called Grandmama; her daughters Neville, Nan, and Pamela; her daughter-in-law Rosalind; and her granddaughter Gerda. (There is another daughter-in-law, the wife of Mrs. Hilary's eldest son Jim, but she doesn't come into the story.) The book takes place over about a year, and we see all these women, interacting with each other, with the men in their lives (or the woman in her life in the case of practical Pamela, who is clearly a Lesbian, though, as with much fiction of this era, this is never openly acknowledged.) The novel is not a very plotty novel, though much of the action is driven by Nan's decision to finally marry her long-time lover Barry Briscoe, only to have him fall in love with Gerda after he misinterprets Nan's brief avoidance of him to make sure she's made up her mind as a rejection. 

The women are all beautifully and honestly depicted. Mrs. Hilary is, as noted, rather stupid, and also rather prejudiced. She hates modern novels but also hates to have it known she doesn't read much. She hates psycho-analysis but then is driven to take it up when she realizes she's depressed. And she has little idea how to treat her children, though she fairly sincerely loves them. Grandmama, a fairly minor character, is a sensible and knowing woman, thoroughly a creature of the late Victorian era, and mostly just ready to die whenever her time comes. Neville -- to me the most sympathetic character (along with Nan) struggles with her new studies, loves Rodney but in some ways doesn't fully respect him, does her best to help her children while letting them make their mistakes. Pamela is, as noted, solidly practical, and she has only a minor role in the novel (and her partner even less), though she gets the last word. Rosalind is truly an actively nasty person, a gossip, serially unfaithful to her husband Gilbert, vulgar, always ready to hurt her family members, and also an unintellectual woman who takes up fad after fad (including psycho-analysis.) Gerda is young and pretty and enthusiastic, a poet but not a very good one, an eager but not necessarily effective worker. And Nan -- Nan -- in her 30s, with a reputation of going from man to man, a novelist (a modern one!), often sarcastic, never sure of herself enough to commit ... she's the one I rooted for. 

As I suggested, the novel is to some degree plotless (but in a good, readable, way) -- but in the end coalesces around the arc of Nan and Gerda vying for Barry's affections. This involves Gerda working for Barry for a while, and then a vacation for Nan and Gerda and Barry and Kay, in which inevitably the athletic Nan goads the frailer Gerda into a sort of competition -- with of course a shocking ending that only hurts Nan's chances -- followed by Nan running off to Rome where another man is fleeing his wife ... it would all be melodramatic but in fact the narration -- at times sardonic, at time humorous, at times sympathetic -- never gives off that feel. 

The "Dangerous Ages" of the title are really any age -- at least for women -- though the quote in the book is directed at Nan's age. But the book is interested in all the women, and it is deeply feminist without being quite overtly so. But for all the book's women -- even the foolish Mrs. Hilary or the foul Rosalind -- their culturally defined roles are a burden. And they battle it -- Grandmama with her resignation, Mrs. Hilary with her fads and depression, Neville most explicitly, with her desire for an independent life (without ever wanting to leave Rodney), Nan with her cynicism and her pain, Rosalind with her sleeping around and her nastiness, and Gerda with her optimism about social change, and her hesitation at the idea of marriage. Perhaps only Pamela -- in some ways the most "modern" of all, living with a woman, making her own living -- has escaped her milieu's strictures. I hope I'm not making the novel seem ponderous or tendentious -- it is not that at all -- told with a light touch, ever interesting, its characters well portrayed, their fates revealed honestly. It is not perhaps a great novel, but it's a very good one, and a book that deserves attention now, a century and a bit after it was published.

(*The names of the Blendish children, of course, are the same names as the children in Hans Christian Anderson's classic tale "The Snow Queen", but I confess I don't see a real parallel between them and Anderson's characters. Perhaps the only meaning is to suggest something about how Neville and Rodney chose to name their children.)