Dangerous Ages

Overview

“May I ask your daughter’s age?”
“Nan is thirty-three.”
“A dangerous age.”

Rose Macaulay takes a lively and perceptive look at three generations of women within the same family and the ‘dangers’ faced at each of those stages in life. The book opens with Neville celebrating her 43rd birthday and contemplating middle age now that her children are grown. Her mother, in her sixties, seeks answers to her melancholy in Freudianism. Her sister, Nan, 33, a writer who has hitherto led a single and carefree life in London, experiences the loss of love and with it her plan for the future. And Neville’s principled daughter Gerda, who is determined not to follow her mother’s generation into the institute of marriage, finds herself at an impasse with the man she loves.

British Library Women Writers 1920's.

Part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, the British Library Women Writers series highlights the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal, and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise, and inform.

Reviews

"Macaulay’s meticulous, understated storytelling traces the hairline crack between laughter and tears, finds grand universals in ordinary foibles, and speaks, without blush or wink, of sin and repentance."―Paste Magazine on The Towers of Trebizond

"One of the few authors of whom it may be said she adorns our century."  --Elizabeth Bowen