(1881-1958) UK author of twenty-three novels from 1906, the most famous being her last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Some of these books – such as And No Man's Wit (1940), in which a mermaid appears – venture edgily into fantasy. What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918; libellous passages cut 1919), set several years into the Near Future after the end of World War One, depicts in Satirical terms the coming to power in the UK of an autocratic government designed to counter postwar crises. (Although copies exist of the 1918 version, two passages of which portray a newspaper proprietor attempting political blackmail, it seems never to have been officially released for reasons of potential libel.) Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings (1922) is set in an undefined Near Future where a monarchist counter-revolution has replaced the Bolsheviks in Russia and a reporter (a woman in drag) helps save the League of Nations from a conspiracy designed to restore communism. Orphan Island (1924) is a borderline Utopia (see also Islands) set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and satirizing conventional Victorian social and sexual mores (> Sex). In the year of her death Macaulay was made a Dame of the British Empire. [JC]
see also: Politics.
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
born Rugby, Warwickshire: 1 August 1881
died London: 30 October 1958
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