ABSTRACT
Mystery at Geneva (1922) is one of Rose Macaulay's lesser-known novels. Critics and biographers seem to agree that it is a light piece of entertainment. Macaulay locates gender in the mind, in personal interests and topics of conversation. Gender largely depends on one's mental constitution: It may be observed that there are in this world mental females, mental males, and mental neutrals. The mental females, or womanly women, are apt to talk about clothes, children, domestics, the prices of household commodities, love affairs, or personal gossip. This chapter suggests a different reading because it seems to me that the concept of mental neutrality does not fit easily into Plato's theory of androgyny. In her excellent article on Macaulay's liberalism, Sue Thomas also points out Macaulay's diversion from a Freudian model of gender constitution. Thomas notes that Rose Macaulay does not subvert the 'liberal humanity tenet that personality is determined by conscious subjectivity, a tenet challenged by Freudian psychoanalysis'.
