Non-Combatants and Others: Writings Against War 1916-1945 (Handheld World War 2 Classics, 2)

About the Author\nRose Macaulay was a leading British literary figure of the 20th century, crossing genres and forms, and was made a Dame for services to literature in 1958, a few months before her death. She was born in Rugby in 1881, and was the second daughter of a family of seven children, with whom she lived in Italy for seven years during her childhood. On returning to Britain as an adolescent, she went to school and later university in Oxford, where she was awarded the equivalent of a degree in history in 1903. When Macaulay left Oxford to rejoin her family in rural Wales, she began to publish poetry, and then novels. In 1906, two months before her first novel was published, the family moved to Great Shelford, a village south of Cambridge, where her father taught English literature at Trinity College. In 1912 Macaulay’s sixth novel, The Lee Shore, won a Hodder & Stoughton literary prize of £600 (equivalent to over £50,000 or $70,000 in the present day), finally giving her financial independence. She moved to London in 1913. When the First World War broke out Macaulay volunteered as a VAD in a hospital for a few months but was much happier when she began working on the land. After nearly a year in the Women’s Land Army Macaulay succeeded in her application for an office job. She published the first pacifist novel in Britain in 1916, Non-Combatants and Others. From January 1917 she worked in the War Office on cases of exemption from military service and conscientious objectors. When the war ended Macaulay began to publish prolifically as a professional woman of letters. Her second volume of poetry came out in 1919. She published twenty-two books between 1919 and 1939: only half of these were novels, but at least one, Potterism (1920) was a best-seller. Her two most well-known novels would appear after the Second World War, during which, at the age of sixty, she was a volunteer ambulance driver. The World My Wilderness (1950) and The Towers of Trebizond (1956) would bring her widespread fame at a level that her earlier novels had not achieved.\nJessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research concerns the relationships between narrative, culture and affect, and has addressed a range of women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Katherine Mansfield, Sarah Waters, and Pat Barker. Her most recent books include Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things (ed., with Patricia Juliana Smith, 2019) and Don’t Look Now (2017), a study of the cinematic adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s story.\nRose Macaulay’s anti-war writing collected in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume.
Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing and was one of the first novels to be written and published in Britain during World War I that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. Scathing and heart-breaking, it finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict.
Also included is some of Macaulay’s journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, detailing 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 and a short story narrating a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions in the Blitz.
The Introduction is by Jessica Gildersleeve of the University of Southern Queensland.