What is it that draws thousands of tourists every year to Mexico, to Egypt, to Greece and places all over the world just to look at ruined heaps of stone, the relics of some glamorous but fallen civilisation? In this fascinating book Rose Macaulay, the well known novelist (and traveller in her own right), sets out to explain that strange 'pleasure of ruins' which has drawn and driven travellers through the ages. Through her own eyes and through the commentary of great observers of the past, from Petrarch to Henry James, she takes the reader on a gigantic excursion across continents and down the centuries through the marvellous relics of dead cities and palaces, in Europe, in the gorgeous (but now jungle swamped) East, in sand- engulfed North Africa, in Mexico and the Peruvian forests. With them she speculates on life before the cities fell and recreates with sensitivity and wit the people who built and destroyed these glorious civilisations, and what their ruins have meant to others. Her definitive work covers the archaeological and architectural aspects of the sites as well as their literary associations and the book is fully illustrated with both photographs and sketches by travellers of the past.
Author
Emilie Rose Macaulay, whom Elizabeth Bowen called "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century," was born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master. Descended on both sides from a long line of clerical ancestors, she felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill the early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville, and on coming down lived with her family first in Wales, then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There she began a writing career which was to span fifty years with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906. When her sixth novel, The Lee Shore (1912), won a literary prize, a gift from her uncle allowed her to rent a tiny flat in London, and she plunged happily into London literary life. From BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ros...
