With a presentiment that she has now pretty well exhausted the satirical vein, I have been re-reading "Potterism," 1920. It is a breezy book, and with "Dangerous Ages" contains nearly everything of hers that fans the smoldering ashes of my sanguine years. It is dedicated, a bit pedantically, to "the unsentimental precisians in thought, who have, on this confused, inaccurate and emotional planet, no fit habitation." People who hankered to be "unsentimental precisians" were not so few as one feared. In 1921 "Potterism" had run through thirty-five editions.
Just what was it in this first book that cried "come hither" to so many readers? The gospel of Wells, the ideas of Wells, with the rose color rubbed off, the sentiment squeezed out. The Anti-Potterite League for the Investigation of Fact, for the destruction of cant, the slapdash, the second-rate, pomposity, mush, shellacked propriety and every hollow, plausible form of words employed to mask and blur the hard, sharp edges of actuality. Youth was there, shameless, fearless, uncompromising youth, truculently showing up the base compliances of parents. Above all, young women were there, with Cambridge honors, scientifically trained, tempered, edged, going into the world fully prepared to compete with their brothers, and bent on getting some of the important jobs, and demonstrating that "woman's work" is a disgusting Potterism.
"Dangerous Ages," which followed hard upon "Potterism" in 1921, is the only book of Rose Macaulay's which wrings the heart, or, indeed, much recognizes the existence of that organ. It is my impression that no dozen novels of my time have given me so much authentic information about womankind as this one.
