A Middlebrow Dame Commander: Rose Macaulay, the ‘Intellectual Aristocracy’, and <em>The Towers of Trebizond</em>

Abstract

In 1955 Noel Annan argued that a veritable ‘intellectual aristocracy’ had developed in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century and that it remained in power well into the twentieth. Tracing the accomplishments, marriages, and honours of the Darwin, Huxley, Macaulay, Stephen, Thackeray, and Strachey families, among others, Annan began his discussion with the author Rose Macaulay (1881–1956) as his exemplar of all of this acclaimed, diligent, and strategic work; his decision was based on her professional achievements, her immediate family’s contributions to academia, the arts, and politics, and her vast web of distinguished relations.1 Such a pronouncement must have come as quite a shock to Macaulay and many of her contemporaries. While her birth, education, and books on history, literary criticism, and travel earned her praise as a respectable author, the best-selling novels, popular journalism, and lively essay collections that formed most of her prolific literary output positioned her as more of a ‘middlebrow’ writer in the literary public sphere. Moreover, much of Macaulay’s career spanned the interwar ‘battle of the brows’, a period of great tensions over culture hierarchies, disparagement of popular writers by more elite authors and critics, and challenges to the cultural dominance of intellectual or highbrow authors by more popular authors and the mainstream reading public. The sudden prestige for an author predominantly associated with the middlebrow sphere, of which Annan’s essay is just one aspect, marked a significant shift in attitudes towards the middlebrow in Britain at this time. And much of this new cultural capital can be attributed to Macaulay’s successful positioning of herself as a reputable and popular public intellectual. The meandering evolution of Macaulay’s career offers an important perspective on the impact that the rise and fall of British modernism had on middlebrow women writers. As Ann Ardis has shown, there were clear indicators of middlebrow culture years before the term arose in the 1920s, yet it was not until