Emilie Rose Macaulay was an English writer, most noted for her award-winning novel The Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography, reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs. Her novels were partly influenced by Virginia Woolf. Macaulay also wrote biographies, travelogues, and poetry.

Elizabeth Bowen called her "one of the few writers of whom it may be said, she adorns our century." Born at Rugby, where her father was an assistant master, Macaulay was descended from a long line of clerical ancestors and felt Anglicanism was in her blood. Much of her childhood was spent in Varazze, near Genoa, and memories of Italy fill her early novels. The family returned to England in 1894 and settled in Oxford. She read history at Somerville and, upon graduating, lived with her family first in Wales and then near Cambridge, where her father had been appointed a lecturer in English. There, she began a writing career which was to span fifty years, starting with the publication of her first novel, Abbots Verney, in 1906.