Book review | Dangerous Ages
by Rose Macauley
I've noticed that some of my best-loved books follow the same strange circulatory publishing pattern:
They are published initially to popular acclaim.
They then go out of favour and out of print due to a change in literary fashion.
Only to be rediscovered years later by an astute publisher and re-published for new generations of readers to fall in love with.
It's proof they contain something that was true then, is true today, and still has the power to touch and move us.
Can the same be said for the latest hyped bestseller? Maybe, maybe not. Time is the test of a good book.
Dangerous Ages (1921) by Rose Macaulay is a prime example, winning a prestigious book prize on publication (the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize) followed in due course by the 'Rose Who?' phase, and is now the latest to be re-issued in the British Library Women Writers series.
The 'dangerous ages' referred to here aren't the Dark Ages or Western Colonialism. It's you and me, it's the ages we celebrate on birthday cards.
Among others, we meet Neville (43) who feels she must 'do' something now her family are grown up and thinks the answer is to re-start the medical training she gave up in her twenties.
Mrs Hilary (63) is restlessly searching for some new philosophy to explain the nameless dissatisfaction she feels.
Gerda (23) is discovering how hard society makes it to stick to your ideals.
Nan (33) has an unexpected but not unpredictable experience of the heart.
Sometimes it seems that Grandmamma (83) is the only woman truly at peace in the book. Or is she?
Whatever age the reader is I can almost guarantee if you are female you will identify with at least one and probably more of these and the other women characters in turn because at the hub of the novel is the puzzle of what women envision they want at each stage of their lives, and the reality of what they get.
This book is 100 years old yet it feels completely modern and made me reflect on my own life and choices, so relevant are the lives it depicts.
Author: Rose Macaulay, with Preface by Lucy Evans, and Afterword by Simon Thomas
Brand: British Library Publishing
Number of pages: 256 pages
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978 0 7123 5387 8
e-ISBN: 978 0 7123 6786 8
