DREAMING OF ROSE: A Biographer’s Journal, a deeper dive into the life of a pre-feminist ikon of independence

DREAMING OF ROSE: A Biographer’s Journal
SARAH LeFANU
Handheld Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Said: The companion to Sarah LeFanu's biography of Dame Rose Macaulay.

Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal is a fascinating account of a biographical quest and of a personal journey. While working on her biography of the writer and traveller Rose Macaulay, Sarah LeFanu kept a journal that charts the details of that quest: the people she met, the places she visited, and her strange dreamworld encounters with the very subject of her biographical pursuit.

Research trips to Varazze in Italy to look for Rose’s childhood, and to Trabzon in Turkey to find traces of The Towers of Trebizond, were remarkably intuitive ventures that found treasures in unexpected places.

Dreaming of Rose is also a memoir of a woman juggling the demands of teaching, research and writing while patching together a living. LeFanu’s work on Rose was squeezed in between many other commitments and responsibilities: she wrote for the BBC and taught creative writing and English literature. Suffused with the tensions and dramas of everyday life, and the necessity for intellectual integrity, this is an important memoir of women and writing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Do you watch the end-credits of films? Are you by nature (or nurture, can't be sure which) a completist? Is the world a maze of maddening omissions and lacunae that you *know* were worth including but simply got...left behind?

My friend, do I have a reading experience for you!

I'll begin my praise for this book with things that will cause Some Eyebrows to rise like theatre (note: misspelling intentional) curtains: 1) I am a man; 2) I am an American; and 3) I am utterly ignorant of Rose Macaulay as anything except the author of Towers of Trebizond and its utterly mesmerizing, loathsome Father Chantry-Pigg, that personification of Religion in all its malevolent, seductive self-righteousness. There was, I am now aware, a LOT more to Rose Macaulay than I ever knew.

And the weird part is that I never knew that I never knew this entire life existed. Macaulay doesn't get a lot of public mention, though goodness knows it seems she should. Author LeFanu wrote an entire biography of Macaulay (non-affiliate Kindle link), for heavens' sake! And how I wish I'd read it first....

What makes me say that about a read I'm rating four stars, you could reasonably ask. Well, it's this simple: While this is not a book about Rose Macaulay, it *is* about the author's quest for her life and doings. The fact is that Author LeFanu went down several rabbit-holes in her quest to comprehend the life of a very, in fact a notoriously, private person. Had I had a sense of Macaulay's trajectory (beyond reading a single, late work of fiction by her) I would've had a frame of reference to put the anecdotes into. The challenges of LeFanu's quest would've felt more immediate to me had I had the recent experience of learning Macaulay's life's details.

I liked the read a lot. I wanted to know what the heck was going on to cause Author LeFanu to have these specific collywobbles, so I would've benefited from reading her biography of the writer...and that is something I shall now do. I will, as I've only recently read this fascinating companion to the main book, have an even richer experience of the read.

I urge the read on anyone who thinks the conundrum of living life and making art has one correct answer.