Here is a great literary find. These letters written by Rose Macaulay to Father Hamilton Johnson, an Anglican priest, show her to have been one of the great letter-writers of this century. Rose Macaulay first met Hamilton Johnson in 1914. At that time he was at the London headquarters of the Cowley Fathers and they met there perhaps half a dozen times. In 1916 he was transferred to America and they lost touch, until in 1950 he happened to read a copy of her novel, They Were Defeated. He wrote a fan letter: she replied. And so started a correspondence, and a friendship which was to flower into the series of letters published in this volume. It tells the story of her return, after thirty years' estrangement, to the life of the Anglican Church. But to describe these letters as simply religious is hardly to do justice to the range of topics they discuss or to the level at which the discussion is conducted. To Rose Macaulay the letter seems to have been a completely natural means of self-expression. On one of her letters Hamilton Johnson scribbled "spontaneous, literary, characteristic." It is impossible to improve upon this description: their spon-taneity is complete, they are literary in expression and content; the humanity, the humour and the mind which they reflect- quickly stimulated, wide-ranging, inquisitive, learned-is so characteristic that the reader can practically catch the tone of Rose Macaulay's voice. She writes of places and people, of books (including her own) and their authors, of ruins and bathing, of bicycling and genealogy, of pronunciation and liturgy...This book is the reflection of a very remarkable woman, and a memorial to her art.

Author Biography

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), born in Rugby and educated at Oxford, was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958. One of the most popular satirical novelists of her day, Told by an Idiot, first published in 1923, is her panoramic tour de force, revealing, through the eyes of the extraordinary Garden family, the social, political and religious fortunes of England from the age of Victoria to the 1920s. Constance Babington Smith (1912-2000) MBE Legion of Merit FRSL was a journalist and writer, daughter of the senior Civil Servant Henry Babington Smith. She was educated at home at Chinthurst, England and in France, before moving to London in adult life. She worked for the milliner Aage Thasrup and also Vogue magazine in London, before venturing into journalism, with The Aeroplane magazine. From 1946 to 1950 she was a researcher for Life Magazine. She later moved to Cambridge, England, where she converted to Greek Orthodoxy and become a writer and biographer. Her war memoir Evidence in Camera was in 1957 the first comprehensive narrative of British photographic reconnaissance in the Second World War.