Compare Non-Combatants and Others

This volume is an anthology of all Macaulay’s anti-war and anti-Fascist writing One novel, Non-Combatants and Others, one of the first novels advocating pacifism to be published in the UK in WW1, in 1916. • Witty, intelligent, sardonic, heartbreaking • has been out of print for decades • will be jumped on by teachers of WW1 literature and culture, and by courses on responses to war • a companion novel to Potterism in that it also tackles the hypocrisy and manipulation of the mass media A selection of 16 pieces of pre- and wartime journalism by RM • all unseen since their original publication • selected to show how often and how vehemently she attacked advocates of war, and the rise of Fascism in Britain • also show her responses to war in the Blitz, when she was a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of 60 • standout essays include: o her withering assessment of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia o an account of attending a rally of the Blackshirts at the Royal Albert Hall in 1936 o her remarkable reportage from Lisbon in 1943, observing neutrality in action o her account of how the BBC managed its reporting and response to war, as a radio reviewer Her most famous short story ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ • Inescapably autobiographical • Relates how her flat was bombed in the Blitz in 1941, when she lost all her possessions, including her lover’s letters and all her books • One of the classic accounts of the war as endured by women, and in the case an older woman. Without family, bereft and alone without even memories. Kate edited this anthology to showcase RM’s anti-war writing, and to show the range of her non-fiction, which is sadly unknown since most of it is out of print. Introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve of Southern Queensland University, Australia, discusses RM’s anti-war writing as her attempt to handle the failure of the pacifist movement to stop war after WW1. Links also to our May 2020 title, A Quaker Conscientious Objector. The cover illustration, ‘Peace Angel’, is by the Norwegian caricaturist Olaf Gulbransson, published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus in 1917. Like all our Classics covers, it’s contemporary with the text, and reflects the writing’s themes.