Rose Allatini

Rose Laure Allatini married Cyril Scott in 1921. By then she had already published five of the forty novels she wrote, but it was her fourth, written under the name of A.T. Fitzroy that caused the most uproar. 

WW I was still raging when Despised and Rejected appeared. It was the first novel with a hero, not only gay but also a pacifist, and a bi-sexual if not lesbian heroine!

It was too much for the Britain of the time. The book was quickly banned and all unsold copies destroyed - not because it was obscene, notice, but because it might deter young men from joining the armed forces!

With the 100th Anniversary of that war, the book is more timely than ever, and Brett Rutherford has produced a most handsome, annotated edition explaining all references that might by now have become obscure. It is published by the Poet's Press and is available on Amazon.

Rose and Cyril were both dedicated artists, happiest when working.

Rose was born to a cultured but very conventional Jewish family in Vienna in 1890, but moved with them to London in 1894 where she grew up and lived for the rest of her life. Determined from an early age to be a writer, she left home as soon as she could and published her first novel in 1914, a few months before the outbreak of  WWI.

Writing was her whole life, though for the first six years of her marriage she devoted herself solely to helping her husband, checking the proofs of his manuscripts because she was knowledgable about music, correcting solecisms in his writings and bearing his two children, Desmond and Vivian. It was the longest time in her life she went without writing a book.

Many of her novels are concerned with Karma and reincarnation, a belief she shared with Cyril. It is not known exactly when they first met, but it could have been during the war at The Firs, a convalescent Guest House run by Alex and Nelsa Chaplin. Mrs Chaplin was a talented psychic healer and clairvoyant who played an important part in both their lives.

She was the subject of several of Rose's novels and was the medium through whom Cyril was able to write one of his more successful occult books, 'Music, Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages'.

Rose was herself clairvoyant, and this had great significance for Cyril. Not clairvoyant himself, he relied on those who were to keep him in touch with his spiritual  master, whom he was convinced guided him in all his work.

Rose had the same master, and this was another bond between them.

Sadly, due to a severe illness between the births of her first and second child, she lost the ability, but that did not deter her from her writing.

In 1939, when WWII broke out, Rose and Cyril separated and never got together again though they remained good friends for the rest of their lives, consulted each other regularly and helped each other whenever they could.
 
Rose used a number of pseudonyms, including R.Allatini, A.T. Fitzroy, Lucian Wainwright, Mrs Cyril Scott, and lastly Eunice Buckley, publishing 25 of her 40 novels under that name.

Love and Romance are important in her work, but to consider her merely as a romantic novelist, as some have done, is seriously to misread her writings.

Though the tone is often comic, Rose had a serious purpose. Unusual among novelists, the spiritual was as important to her as the temporal. Her skill as a writer enabled her to engage her readers with an engrossing tale, at the same time as allowing her to question and demostrate the workings of karma and reincarnation she believed in so strongly.

She died two months short of her 91st birthday, still jotting down notes for another book, the last one, 'Work of Art' having been published only two years earlier when she was 88.