Rose Allatini

RA is known for a single novel, Despised and Rejected, 1918, whose pacifist and homosexual content has attracted critics. Yet her career as author of almost forty known novels and a few short stories ran from 1914 to 1978, latterly under two successive pseudonyms which most library catalogues do not identify as hers. She began with dark novels whose idealistic, imaginative young protagonists are bitterly chastened by society. To these themes she added bodily damage by illness or accident, early death, and settings among cosmopolitan Jewish families radiating warmth, authoritarianism (especially towards women), and internal rivalries. Her Jewish interests gradually gave way to a focus on the occult; in both it seems likely that she drew heavily on her own experience. She continued to be preoccupied with illness and healing, careers and vocations, and with art as spiritual manifestation, and added to these a concern with great souls, and the transcendence of individuality by unity and of death by a transfigured afterlife. From the beginning she was prone to repetition from one book to another, and in later novels her popular tone became sensational, then clichéd both in style and incident.