2010s

I love looking behind the scenes at books, and I’m particularly fascinated by the process of biography – because it’s a type of book that I can’t get my head around attempting. How to capture a full life of many, many days in one volume? How to approach it when there are already two existing biographies of that subject? These are among the things that Sarah LeFanu discusses in Dreaming of Rose, a diary of her research and writing a biography of Rose Macaulay, from 1998 until she finished writing it in 2002. It was self-published in 2013 and has now been reissued by Handheld Press.

I’ve read two biographies of Macaulay – but not this one. Still, a lot of the names will be familiar to anybody who has read any of the biographies, and you don’t have to have read any of Macaulay’s output to find this interesting. Indeed, LeFanu writes a great deal more about Macaulay’s personal life in Dreaming of Rose than she does about her published output – perhaps because trying to track down connections with possible-affair Gerald O’Donovan was more captivating a chase than analysing her novels.

Reviews of books like this tend to replicate all the information found therein, but I shan’t make this a potted biography of Macaulay. There are more than enough places to find that. Instead, I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about LeFanu’s book – the former easily outweighing the latter.

It’s always terribly interesting to see how writers deal with the problems of structure – speaking as someone who finds this the hardest part of writing anything, and the most satisfying to fall into place.

Terrible frustration with my chapter on the Great War. It creaks and plods and I don’t really know what I’m saying about Rose and the war; I’ve been stuck on it all autumn. Reading the descriptive selection on the war in Told By An Idiot I found myself getting annoyed with Rose for not being sharp like Virginia Woolf was sharp, for muddling and muddying it, for sitting on the fence, for saying: the war meant this for this person, that for that person. I found myself for the first time feeling actively hostile towards her.

I suspect I’m blaming Rose for my inability to get on with writing this chapter. I desperately need a clear space with no teaching. I’m doing a day school on women poets the weekend after this, and haven’t even begun to think about it. And then there’s all next term’s reading still to do. Meanwhile a librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Centre will send me a copy of the Rose Macaulay card catalogue, and Muriel Thomas has unearthed six ‘chatty’ letters from Rose that she ‘can’t recollect proffering’ to Jane Emery [a previous biographer], which she’s going to photocopy and send.

For what it’s worth, LeFanu had a much better time with Harry Ransom than I did a decade or so later, where they wouldn’t send me even a photo of two pages from the only existing copy in the world of a journal I really needed for my DPhil. Still shocked at how unhelpful they were!

Of course, LeFanu wasn’t only preoccupied with her Macaulay biography during this period. She doesn’t write a great deal about her personal life, but there are intriguing aspects of other parts of her professional life – particularly when she is writing radio plays, one about Macaulay and one about Dorothy L Sayers. The back and forth with BBC editors sounds extremely painful. And I could have read a whole diary-worth about her brief experience at the helm of Radio 4’s A Good Read, and suspecting (correctly) that she is about to be fired.

This is one of many times when LeFanu has to consider her finances – and the precarious state of these is very illuminating about the process of writing. Grants become vitally important, as do other opportunities for work which are distracting but pay the bills.

As well as LeFanu’s travels all over the place to speak to people who’d known Macaulay, or might have some of her letters somewhere – and, of course, the correspondence with people reluctant to speak to LeFanu – I enjoyed the insights into the process of publishing. I wish she’d kept the diary going until after publication, because I’d have loved to read about her reaction to reviews, PR etc. But things like this, from towards the end of the diary, were great:

I think finishing a book is more like getting a divorce than like sending a child out into the world; and least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling details have to be discussed backwards and forwards, letters of supplication written to Random House, saying no I can’t afford such and such an amount for quoting just three lines of Virginia Woolf, and letters of protestation to the Wren at what they want to charge for reproducing some of the Macaulay family photos. Where are the feelings of pride, or relief? I’m filled with anxiety and frustration, tied by a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off.

I’ll close with the short list of things I felt weren’t so successful in Dreaming of Rose. The addendum on some letters being released from their embargo was interesting but didn’t balance well with the rest of the book – it felt like a heavy weight on the end of the diary structure. Nobody wants to hear anybody’s dreams and, title notwithstanding, it wasn’t interesting to read about LeFanu’s dreams. Then there is a wearyingly familiar disdain for people of faith, which isn’t particularly helpful in a biographer of somebody who had faith.

Those are minor gripes about a book that was engrossing and very enjoyable, even without having read LeFanu’s biography. It hasn’t left me particularly feeling the need to read a third biography of Macaulay, and I think Constance Babington-Smith’s is probably the one that appeals most to me, because I always prefer one written by somebody who knew the subject (even if it less likely to be ruthlessly open, or that impossibility, ‘objective’). But even if you’ve never read a word of Macaulay’s writing and don’t have much interest in her life, I think Dreaming of Rose would appeal for that rare opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain at the life of a biographer.