ABSTRACT
Rose Macaulay's youthful appearance and demeanour were frequently noted by contemporaries and biographers. Rosamund Lehmann writes shortly after Macaulay's death: 'She has been called child-like; but to me she suggested youth, a girl'. Rose Macaulay recognised that the rhetoric about differences between generations was a marketing ploy, but she also understood the serious social cost of the media's insistence on the high value of youth. The chapter concerns how Macaulay's invented media spoke to the condition of women's bodies. Although Macaulay found absurd the claim that the rejection of the old by the young was a specifically post-war phenomenon, she acknowledged the reality that publishers, journalists, and mass-market novelists made a business out of proclaiming the ascendance of youth and the exhaustion and dissolution of the older generation. The interplay among age, generation, and gender is explored with specificity in Macaulay's 1921 novel Dangerous Ages, which contrasts four generations of women, aged from twenty to eighty-six in one family.
