The World My Wilderness

by Rose Macaulay, Penelope Fitzgerald (Introduction)

Overview

'Poignant and inspiring' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader' HERMIONE LEE, GUARDIAN

'An elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War' PARIS REVIEW

It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the War. Sent by her beautiful, indolent mother to England, Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Barbary has spent her childhood years in the sunshine of Provence. During the War, she ran wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal and resistance. In peacetime the young woman has been taken away from all she knows and placed into the drab austerity of post-war London life.

Confused and unhappy, she discovers the flowering bomb craters around St Paul's Cathedral. Here, in the bombed heart of London, with the outcasts living on the edge of society, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780349010014
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	02/08/2018
Series:	Virago Modern Classics , #15
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	759 KB

About the Author

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was born in Rugby, Warwickshire. She studied Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford and wrote her first novel, Abbots Verney in 1906. She was introduced to the London literary scene by her childhood friend Rupert Brooke, and her friends included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen. Macaulay became a celebrated writer who published over thirty works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry in her lifetime, including Crewe Train and The World My Wilderness. She won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (1956) and was awarded the DBE in 1957.

Editorial Reviews

Poignant and inspiring.

Sunday Telegraph

This novel about a 17-year-old girl's move from a fishing village in France to London in the aftermath of WW II was first published in 1950. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The World My Wilderness . . . had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in post-war London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself and for Europe—Guardian

Poignant and inspiring—Sunday Telegraph

Her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness(1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of the Second World War . . . A book born of loss and destruction. It deals in the grim realities of a civilization that's brought itself to the brink—Paris Review

From the Publisher

Clare Corbett's sympathetic performance of Rose Macaulay's 1950 novel about the costs of war highlights its mix of the satiric and the heartfelt. When 17-year-old Barbary is sent to live with her conventional father in London after growing up semi-wild in southern France with her mother, she finds adventure and comfort among the vagabonds and criminals who inhabit London's bombed-out neighborhoods. Corbett's choice of a light, sometimes childlike, voice for Barbary emphasizes her naïveté and self-centeredness. Her father sounds appropriately stiff, while her mother's mix of charm and toughness is apparent in Corbett's mellifluous but resolute delivery. As does Macaulay's writing, Corbett builds audio portraits that evoke sympathy and ridicule, often simultaneously. Thus, she creates a fine interpretation of this period-specific yet timeless novel. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2024 - AudioFile