Rose Macaulay was born in Rugby in 1881, and was the second daughter of a family of seven children. She lived in Italy with her family for seven years during her childhood, and returning to Britain as an adolescent, she went to school in Oxford. Later she attended Somerville College, where she was awarded the equivalent of a degree in history in 1903. In 1901 the family moved from Oxford to live in Aberystwyth, on the mid-west Welsh coast, at whose university her father was Professor of English Language and Literature. When Macaulay left Oxford to move to rural Wales, she began to publish poetry, and then novels. In 1906, two months before her first novel was published, the family moved again, to Great Shelford, a village south of Cambridge, where Professor Macaulay now taught English literature at Trinity College.
In 1912 Macaulay's sixth novel, The Lee Shore, won a Hodder & Stoughton literary prize of £600 (equivalent to over £50,000 at the time of writing), finally giving her financial independence. She moved to London in 1913. When the First World War broke out Macaulay volunteered as a VAD in a hospital for a few months but was much happier when she began working on the land. After nearly a year in the Women's Land Army Macaulay succeeded in her application for an office job. From January 1917 she worked in the War Office on cases of exemption from military service and conscientious objectors.
When the war ended Macaulay began to publish prolifically as a professional woman of letters. Her second volume of poetry came out in 1919. She published twenty-two books between 1919 and 1939: only half of these were novels, but at least one, Potterism (1920) was a best-seller. Her two most well-known novels would appear after the Second World War, during which, at the age of sixty, she was a volunteer ambulance driver. The World My Wilderness (1950) and The Towers of Trebizond (1956) would bring her widespread fame at a level that her earlier novels had not achieved.
Although she is best known now as a novelist, in her day Macaulay published far more essays and newspaper columns. These shorter pieces took much less time to write, and as newspaper and magazines paid well, writing for them in the 1920s earned Macaulay a living while she worked on her next book. She was also energetic in creating a public perception of herself as a pundit, by giving public talks, and writing her own opinions into public discourse, on paper and on the air by radio, until the end of her life. In 1958 she would be made a Dame for services to literature, a few months before her death.