The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay

The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay

It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the war. Banished by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Having grown up in the sunshine of Provence, allowed to run wild with the Maquis, experienced collaboration, betrayal and death, Barbary finds it hard to adjust to the drab austerity of postwar London life.

Confused and unhappy, she discovers one day the flowering wastes around St Paul's. Here, in the bombed heart of London, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.

The World My Wilderness. . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in post-war London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself and for Europe * Guardian *
Poignant and inspiring * Sunday Telegraph *
Her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War . . . A book born of loss and destruction. It deals in the grim realities of a civilization that's brought itself to the brink * Paris Review *

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was born in Rugby, Warwickshire. She studied Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford and wrote her first novel, Abbots Verney in 1906. She was introduced to the London literary scene by her childhood friend Rupert Brooke, and her friends included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen. Macaulay became a celebrated writer who published over thirty works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry in her lifetime, including Crewe Train and The World My Wilderness. She won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (1956) and was awarded the DBE in 1957.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780349010007
ISBN 10	0349010005
Title	The World My Wilderness
Author	Rose Macaulay
Series	Virago Modern Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Little, Brown Book Group
Year published	2018-02-08
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.