Dangerous Ages – Rose Macaulay (1921)

Over the last few years’, I have read and enjoyed several Rose Macaulay novels, so I am delighted that she appears to be enjoying something of a revival. A few years ago, Virago brought out some of her novels and now both the British Library and Handheld are re-issuing others. She really is an interesting writer and a prolific one, whose writing career spanned fifty years. Dangerous Ages was Macaulay’s eleventh novel published when she was forty.

“Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flowerbed, bright as a street in hell, – unsteady as swing-boat, silly as a drunkard’s dream, tragic as a poem by Masefield… To have one’s corner in it, to run here and there about the city, grinning like a dog – what more did one want?”

In this novel Rose Macaulay examines four generations of women within one family, each of them at a different ‘dangerous’ stage of womanhood. Women are certainly the focus here – and although there are a few male characters, they really are of lesser importance. The novel is set in 1920 and is a wonderfully immersive portrait of middle class English women of the period. It is also a novel of mothers and daughters – Macaulay exploring this often complex relationship with perceptive understanding – each of the women in her novel standing for a different generation.

“It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.”

Neville is celebrating her forty-third birthday, an event which has caused her to examine her future now that her children are grown up. (Neville is not the only Macaulay character to have a traditionally masculine sounding name – it is something she has done in several of her novels.) She is considering taking up the medical studies that she gave up more than twenty years earlier – why shouldn’t she be a doctor now that she is finished with parenting? Neville’s sister is Nan, ten years her junior – she could almost be another generation – carefree, a little cynical, living life on her terms while Gerda, Neville’s twenty year old daughter, represents a modern generation of young women born at the dawn of the twentieth century, who mock the repressions of their elders’ Victorian past. Another sister, Pamela who is thirty-nine – lives with her friend Frances, they do good works and take care of each other. Hers is a quiet, contented life busy with things that she considers important. Pamela plays little part in the main events of the novel – though it is interesting to compare the lives of these sisters.

Neville’s mother: Mrs Hilary (Emily) is sixty-three – and has been reluctantly inspired by her daughter-in-law Rosalind who she – and no one else it seems – much likes, to investigate Freudianism – which had become very popular around this time. Rosalind, married to Mrs Hilary’s son Gilbert – having started practising Freudianism and extoling its virtues despite no formal qualifications to do so – offers to analyse Mrs Hilary, who decides that she would be more comfortable talking to a man. She consults Dr Craddock, and in talking to him finds a voice. A mother to five, now a widow, living in a small seaside resort Mrs Hilary is rather at a loss, what should she do now that the work of her entire life is done? Mrs Hilary is referred to almost entirely by just her married title – and is only a little less reduced than her mother; Grandmamma now in her eighties, in being essentially nameless. Grandmamma, unlike her daughter and granddaughters is not considering the meaning of her life or worrying about what the next stage might be – she is content, well looked after and continuing to enjoy her garden.

“We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.”

I thought Nan was a wonderful character, rather cool, a young woman full of life who thinks nothing of flying along cliff paths on a bicycle at pull pelt. She isn’t given to emotional displays and keeps her feelings to herself. Nan has frequently been in the company of Barry Briscoe – and their relationship seems to have become an accepted thing – in an ‘only a matter of time’ kind of way. Only, Nan is about to get a rude awakening in her attachment to Barry. While Barry stays in London and offers a job to Gerda at the Worker’s Educational Association that he manages, Nan goes off to Cornwall to finally work out whether she does or does not want to marry Barry. After a few days on her own, Nan is joined as previously arranged by Barry – but he brings Gerda with him. For Barry, Gerda represents the future – what might she and her generation not achieve? While Nan, is very much the present.

Macaulay’s writing is excellent and her characterisation spot on – the interplay between characters really drives this novel forward – there is reasonably little plot. It is a joy to read though – Macaulay’s examination of these women’s various responses to the concerns they face at different stages of their lives is still relevant and hasn’t dated I don’t think. Now really looking forward to reading Potterism re-issued by Handheld press soon.