Ms. Glendinning is an evenhanded advocate for the claims and counterclaims of both Rebecca and Anthony and, additionally, those of Wells, who was married and refused to divorce his wife, Jane, despite Rebecca's periodic ultimatums. . . There are many incoherences, disjunctions, pat psychological formulations and passages of mechanical narration in which time passes as on a clock. . . Much to her credit, however, she resists the temptation to depersonalize and mythologize West into a simple emblem of struggle against gender stereotypes, although that struggle is a vital part of the story.