Introduction [to Non-combatants and others: writings against war, 1916-1945]

Introduction [to Non-combatants and others: writings against war, 1916-1945]

All Rose Macaulay’s anti-war writing, collected together in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. It will be published alongside Potterism, her great 1920 satire on journalism and the newspaper industry (ISBN 9781912766338). Her novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing, and was one of the first novels to be written and published during the First World War that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. It’s scathing and heart-breaking, yet finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict. Her journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War, details the rise of fascism and the civilian response to the impending war. Witty, furious and despairing in turn, these forgotten magazine columns reveal new insights into how people find war and its tyrannies creeping up on them. These are supported by Macaulay’s two inter-war essays on pacifism,‘Apeing the Barbarians’ and ‘Moral Indignation’. Macaulay’s only wartime short story, ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, is a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions in the Blitz. But more desperate a loss than her books were the letters from her secret lover, who had just died. The Introduction is by Jessica Gildersleeve of the University of Southern Queensland.

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