The early novels are unsatisfactory, and many years later Macaulay was thought to want to steal the London Library's copies. The Making of a Bigot (1914) is the first of her works to sound her characteristic note of high comedy. After the war she settled in a flat in Marylebone and began the witty, satiric novels for which she is remembered.
Potterism (1920) is directed against muddled thinking, cant, and sentimentality, of which the newspapers of Lord Potter are the dreadful illustration; the satire has not lost its point. Told by an Idiot (1923), a family chronicle, traces in the liveliest way the changes in British thought and life through the Victorian, fin de siècle, Edwardian, and Georgian periods. The clergyman father of the family is in the course of the novel successively converted to and then lapses from all of the churches from Roman Catholicism to the Higher Thought. The scholarly and loving interest in religion, the detached, ironic, and elegant prose, and the sheer sense of fun are typical of all her best work. Orphan Island (1924) takes us to an idyllic Pacific island where we are delighted to discover that the orphans marooned fifty years before have created a faithful replica of mid-nineteenth-century England complete with a matriarch who fancies herself Queen Victoria.
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