The wisdom of this decision was confirmed shortly after her death when the publication of her letters to her sister and to Father Hamilton Johnson, an Anglican priest, revealed that Macaulay had been involved for more than 20 years in a love affair with a married man who was himself a lapsed Catholic priest. It had been the best kept secret in literary London – no more than half-a-dozen of Macaulay’s own friends had been aware of the relationship – and the ensuing furore after the publication of the first volume of letters in 1961 was ferocious. Rebecca West said the book made her want to vomit, while Elizabeth Bowen referred to Hamilton Johnson, who had approved publication, as “that rat-faced priest”. Rose Macaulay had requested that the letters be burned, but some questioned whether she had really meant this instruction to be carried out.Rose Macaulay was right to be intensely secretive about her private life, and she has been proved right also in her predictions about the survival of her literary reputation.

Since her death in 1958 this has been on a sharp decline, and despite the best efforts of sympathetic advocates, of whom Sarah LeFanu, her new biographer, is the latest (and AN Wilson one of her precursors), it now seems highly unlikely that Macaulay’s books will ever again enjoy a large readership. The brittle, satirical style of her novels of the 1920s – like the enormously successful Potterism, her attack on press barons like Northcliffe and Beaverbrook, which launched Macaulay’s postwar career – now just seems tame and jaded.As a writer Rose Macaulay has become a historical curiosity. Her writing has been described as “one of the great barometers of 20th-century English fiction”, through the way in which it both registers and forecasts “shifts in cultural pressure”, but as this description implies, its main interest nowadays is largely confined to that of the academic specialist. It may be true, as Sarah LeFanu says, that Macaulay’s 1916 novel, Non-Combatants and Others, was one of the first novels of the Great War to deal with the reality of combat rather than the fantasy of it, but other writers, both men and women, were shortly afterwards writing more memorably in that vein. And Told by an Idiot (1923), Macaulay’s panoramic view of the social, political and religious fortunes of England from the Victorian age to the 1920s, seen through the eyes of one family, may anticipate Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published five years later, in its treatment of the changes in human nature from decade to decade, and the extent to which these changes are affected by gender.

But who today could fail to prefer Woolf’s biographical spoof to Macaulay’s dated comedy? Only The Towers of Trebizond, Macauley’s tragicomic novel about the loss of faith, in which the legendary city of Trebizond becomes a symbol of the main character’s agnosticism, seems fit to survive as an unchallenged masterpiece.For the biographer, Rose Macaulay is interesting as a transitional figure, someone born a late Victorian (in 1881) who witnessed the birth of the modern world. Her father George, a cousin of the famous historian, was an assistant master at Rugby, and later a university lecturer at Cambridge; her mother Grace belonged to a family which had produced several generations of intellectual clergymen. After a childhood spent partly on the Italian coast, where Macaulay formed her love of Mediterranean countries, and also indulged boyish fantasies of herself as a sea captain, the family returned to England. Rose, who looked like a lean sheepdog, according to Virginia Woolf, went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1900, but as a result of a nervous collapse, the first of several, failed to sit her final exams and was awarded an aegrotat.The early Macaulay novels – the first appeared in 1906 – are melancholy productions.