Rose Timson
By Marguerite Steen
She accepted the dangers of a strange profession for the sake of her daughters …
Rose Timson is an unforgettable character, her good earthy humour and honesty in approach to life commanding respect from those around her, and her “hempen homespun” quality contagiously warming.
Leaving her husband at a time when divorce was more than frowned upon, Rose is determined to provide a wonderful home for her two little girls – independently and without a man.
“Human need”, says Rose, “goes beyond moral law.” On these lines, she plans her life and soon becomes a criminal …
Over thirty years leading up to the blitz of 1941, we follow the conflict between Rose’s private and professional life.
Tension is provided in her eldest daughter, Kay, in whom Rose glimpses both the sullenness of her former husband and the finesse and sensitivity left out of her own nature.
With Rose’s work taking her to the glitzy cocktail parties of London’s elite and the darker underbelly of the West End, she has no time for silly poetry and Kay’s ‘childish’ fancies.
But, as life passes rapidly by, it is through a final catastrophe that Rose comes to realise the impossibility of keeping her two separate worlds apart …
In this gripping family saga, Marguerite Steen skilfully drifts between humour and drama to build up a wonderful story of a mother’s drive to protect her girls.
Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador (1934) , for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941) . She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951.
