Rose Macaulay was a woman of originality. The author of 36 books - several best-selling novels, culminating in The Towers of Trebizond, criticism, poetry, history and travel - she was also in demand as a journalist and broadcaster, but more than anything else as a friend. Her zest for life, her razor-sharp mind, her caustic but never cruel wit and her brilliant conversation won her friends as various as Rupert Brooke and Gilbert Murray, Virginia Woolf and E.M.Forster, Rosamond Lehmann and Ivy Compton-Burnett. By the 1950s no social or literary event was complete without her. Indominatable, indefatigable, she was everywhere to be seen, a neat bird-like figure like a furled umbrella, or perched in a black bathing-suit before diving into the Serpentine or wading into the Mediterranean Sea. She was an inveterate party-goer, an enthusiastic traveller, and a terrifying force behind the wheel of a car. This was the rose most people know, yet behind this animated and energetic figure was another entirely private one; a woman of deep if troubled spirit, faith, and one whose life for 25 years centred around her passionate love for a married man, Gerald O'Donovan. Jane Emery's portrait illuminates the secret corners of this writer's life. She shows how closely her fiction reflected her experience, and in doing so unravels the essence of a complex and fascinating character. Rose Macaulay's greatest achievement in the end was her life, a triumph of spirit over adversity, and Jane Emery does full justice to this extraordinary story.