Rebecca West (1) (1892–1983)
Author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia
For other authors named Rebecca West, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Taking her name from one of Henrik Ibsen's strong-minded women, Rebecca West was a politically and socially active feminist all her long life. She had an intense 10-year affair with H.G. Wells, with whom she had a son. A brilliant and versatile novelist, critic, essayist, and political commentator, show more West's greatest literary achievement is perhaps her travel diary, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1942). Five years in the writing, it is the story of an Easter trip that she and her husband, British banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (whom she had married in 1930), made through Yugoslavia in 1937. A historical narrative with excellent reporting, it is essentially an analysis of Western culture. During World War II, she superintended British broadcast talks to Yugoslavia. Her remarkable reports of the treason trials of Lord Haw and John Amery appeared first in the New Yorker and are included with other stories about traitors in The Meaning of Treason (1947), which was expanded to deal with traitors and defectors since World War II as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The Birds Fall Down (1966), which was a bestseller, is the story of a young Englishwoman caught in the grip of Russian terrorists. From a true story told to her more than half a century ago by the sister of Ford Madox Ford (who had heard it from her Russian husband), West "created a rich and instructive spy thriller, which contains an immense amount of brilliantly distributed information about the ideologies of the time, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the conflicts of customs, belief, and temperament between Russians and Western Europeans, the techniques of espionage and counter-espionage, and the life of exiles in Paris" (New Yorker). Unlike that of her more famous contemporaries, her fiction is stylistically and structurally conventional, but it effectively details the evolution of daily life amid the backdrop of such historical disasters as the world wars. Her critical works include Arnold Bennett Himself, Henry James (1916), Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, and The Court and the Castle (1957), a study of political and religious ideas in imaginative literature. In 1949, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Rebecca West, 1912
Series
Works by Rebecca West
The Saga of the Century Trilogy: The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund (2010) 29 copies
War Nurse: The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (1930) — Author — 6 copies, 1 review
A Letter to a Grandfather 5 copies
English Biographies 1 copy
A Conversation on the Train 1 copy
Opera in Greenville 1 copy
Associated Works
This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women (2006) — Contributor — 1,146 copies, 36 reviews
Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stael (1958) — Introduction, some editions — 342 copies, 5 reviews
The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1997) — Contributor — 225 copies, 1 review
On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (1989) — Contributor — 126 copies, 1 review
The New Yorker Book of War Pieces: London, 1939 to Hiroshima, 1945 (1947) — Contributor — 114 copies, 2 reviews
Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul (2002) — Contributor — 25 copies, 1 review
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies, 1 review
Agenda : Wyndham Lewis special issue — Contributor — 6 copies
Fourteen stories from one plot, based on "Mr. Fothergill's plot" (1932) — Contributor — 6 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- West, Rebecca
- Legal name
- Fairfield, Cicely Isabel (birth)
- Other names
- Andrews, Cicely Isabel
- Birthdate
- 1892-12-21
- Date of death
- 1983-03-15
- Gender
- female
- Education
- George Watson's Ladies College
Academy of Dramatic Art - Occupations
- writer
author
novelist
Time and Tide (director) - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary ∙ Literature ∙ 1972)
Time and Tide - Awards and honors
- Royal Society of Literature (Companion of Literature)
Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1949)
Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander, 1959)
Women's Press Club Award for Journalism (1948)
Légion d'Honneur
Benson Medal (1966) - Relationships
- West, Anthony (son)
Wells, H. G. (lover)
Fairfield, Letitia (sister)
West, Henry Maxwell (husband) - Short biography
- Rebecca West was the pen name of Cicily Isabel Andrews, née Fairfield, born in London, England (some sources say Kerry, Ireland), to an Anglo-Irish-Scottish family. She was educated in Edinburgh, Scotland but had to leave school at 16. She went to London to train as an actress, and took her pseudonym from her role in the Henrik Ibsen play Rosmersholm. She became a journalist around 1911, working first for the feminist publications Freewoman and the Clarion, in support of women's right to vote, and later contributing essays and reviews to The New Republic, The New York Herald Tribune, The Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and many other national newspapers and magazines in the UK and USA. She was at times a foreign correspondent, and wrote social and cultural criticism, book reviews, travel writing, fiction, and nonfiction. In 1918, she published her first novel, The Return of the Soldier. Other works included The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). After visiting Yugoslavia and the Balkans in 1937, she published the two-volume Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942). Her reports on the Nuremberg trials following World War II were collected in A Train of Powder (1955). West was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959. She had a 10-year liaison with H.G. Wells that began in 1913 and produced a son, Anthony West. At age 37, in 1930, she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland, UK
Ibston, Buckinghamshire, England, UK - Place of death
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Burial location
- Brookwood Cemetery, Brookwood, Woking, Surrey, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
Group Read, April 2025: The Birds Fall Down in 1001 Books to read before you die (April 2025)
February Read: Rebecca West in Virago Modern Classics (March 2017)
Group Read, March 2016: Harriet Hume in 1001 Books to read before you die (March 2016)
Rebecca West recommendations in Virago Modern Classics (June 2013)
Reviews
It's probably a disservice to Rebecca West to read her work as part of an investigation into the life of H. G. Wells. Still, reading about her relationship with Wells made me want to find out what she was like as a writer, as I have never read any of her work, so I picked up The Return of the Soldier, the most popular of her books published during their relationship. (Though I am also curious about The Judge based on Wells's account of its composition in H. G. Wells in Love, and a friend show more recommended Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) Like Catherine Wells, West's literary interests are very different from those of her lover, though I was amused when a "Bert Wells" rated a brief mention. (Seemingly no connection beyond the name, though.)
I knew The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex. show less
I knew The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex. show less
While The Return of the Soldier was Rebecca West's first novel, two years earlier, in 1916, she had published a study of Henry James. Armed with this knowledge, it is hard not to see James's fingerprints all over The Return of the Soldier. West does not, thankfully, emulate his convoluted style, but she does borrow James's brilliantly elaborate examinations of a complex moral dilemma. As such, West's novel bears a striking similarity to James's late works, in particular [b:The Wings of the show more Dove|840693|The Wings of the Dove|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333171879l/840693._SY75_.jpg|121908] and [b:The Golden Bowl|259020|The Golden Bowl|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386921801l/259020._SX50_.jpg|118576].
The novel is narrated in first person by Jenny Baldry, the cousin of the protagonist, Chris Baldry. Clearly Jenny has deeper feelings for her cousin than she is willing to admit, and West's ability to use her narrator to observe and imagine is both breathtaking and subtle. This artistic decision is what elevates the novel into greatness, for Jenny's subjectivity and lyricism add a patina to the story that is simply perfect.
The story opens in 1916, when Jenny finds Kitty, Chris's beautiful, rich, but rather cold wife, in the nursery. The nursery is now a kind of museum to Kitty and Chris's dead son, Oliver, who, five years earlier, had died at the young age of two. Jenny looks out over the garden of Baldry Court and remembers the day when Chris went off to war. She recalls, in particular, that he had always had a naive belief that things work out well, a side that had been suppressed by his growing adult responsibilities: his inheritance of his father's business fifteen years earlier, his marriage to Kitty, and the death of his son. The two women are told that a visitor has come to see them, Margaret Grey, a shabby and plain woman who claims to have news that Chris has suffered from shell-shock. At first, the woman don't believe her, thinking it is a scheme to swindle money from them, but after Margaret produces a telegram, sent to Margaret's former home at Monkey Island, they change their minds.
The next morning, a letter arrives from Frank Baldry, another of Chris's cousins. Frank confirms that Chris has shell-shock, as well as amnesia that means he cannot remember any of the last 15 years, including his wife and dead child. A week later, Chris returns home, but his interactions with his wife and the once-familiar house are awkward. Eventually, he insists on seeing Margaret, a woman he had been in love with 15 years earlier. Kitty, believing that her beauty and wealth are no match for the frumpy Margaret, permits it. Jenny reassures Chris that Kitty really is his wife and his life with her is real. Chris, in turn, tells her that his love from Monkey Island was also real.
Jenny then tells the story of the two lovers on the island, as she reconstructs it from Chris's account. In a memorable scene, Margaret peers in through her own window and imagines not knowing about Chris's love.
From the rich town of Harrowweald, Jenny heads over to nearby Wealdstone, a poor, working-class place marked by industry, in order to fetch Margaret. On her way, Jenny see Chris boating as though he had returned to his boyhood. Jenny finds Margaret's miserable house, Mariposa (Spanish for "butterfly"), and meets her bumbling husband, William Grey. Jenny hears Margaret's side of the original affair, and learns that the two had a falling out when Chris mistook her friendship with another man. After Chris's departure and the death of Margaret's father, she left Monkey Island, with instructions to forward her mail. When she visits years later, the new owner gives her some letters from Chris that she never received, but it is too late: she had already married William. Margaret is increasingly convinced that Margaret is some kind of saint. The two women watch from the nursery window as Margaret and Chris run toward each other and embrace.
Kitty employs Dr. Gilbert Anderson, a psychoanalyst, to try and cure Chris of his amnesia. However, Jenny increasingly believes that Margaret is some kind of mystical blessing that has saved Chris, even though it has come at the expense of his connection to Kitty and Jenny. Jenny finds the two lovers in the woods, with Chris sleeping in Margaret's arms. She tells them about the doctor coming that afternoon.
Dr. Anderson talks with Chris, and concludes that the regression has occurred because, in his former life, he had unconsciously been deeply unhappy. Meanwhile, Margaret learns about Oliver, and reveals that she, too, had a son named Dick whose circumstances mirror those of Chris's son. She suggests that confronting Chris with the memory of Oliver would cure his amnesia. Jenny takes Margaret to the nursery and both women hesitate over whether they should bring Chris back: would it not be better for him to remain in his state of enchantment? Eventually they decide that facing up to reality is the more difficult but rewarding path, and so Margaret goes to show Chris his son's belongings. The strategy works: Chris walks back to the house with the air of a man and a soldier.
There is a provocative ambivalence to West's ending for, like in the aforementioned works by James, there is no satisfaction to be derived from what appears, by all conventions, to be a "desirable" ending. The inheritance of Milly Theale's money (in The Wings of the Dove) or the smashing of the golden bowl provide no resolution, except insofar as they delineate and harden the impossible paradoxes of the unhappy situations that gave rise to them in the first place.
The return of the soldier, the restoration of Chris Baldry's memory, is a brilliant repudiation of romantic and mystical ideas in their many forms - religious, sexual, social, and most of all, nationalistic. In a similar vein to D.H. Lawrence, but more incisively, West refutes the idealization of England as a country of pastoral idylls and rustic beauty.
The war is a symptom of England's underlying illness, an unacknowledged unhappiness that has repeatedly caused it to suppress reality in favor of an idealized past to which it insists on returning. In this respect, West's novel is not only brutally insightful about her own period, but the century or so that has passed since. England continues to live in a delusion of its past grandeur, against all evidence that such a time has passed, and while Chris finds his own bitter "cure" at the novel's end, I don't see this repeated cycle of regression ending any time soon. show less
The novel is narrated in first person by Jenny Baldry, the cousin of the protagonist, Chris Baldry. Clearly Jenny has deeper feelings for her cousin than she is willing to admit, and West's ability to use her narrator to observe and imagine is both breathtaking and subtle. This artistic decision is what elevates the novel into greatness, for Jenny's subjectivity and lyricism add a patina to the story that is simply perfect.
The story opens in 1916, when Jenny finds Kitty, Chris's beautiful, rich, but rather cold wife, in the nursery. The nursery is now a kind of museum to Kitty and Chris's dead son, Oliver, who, five years earlier, had died at the young age of two. Jenny looks out over the garden of Baldry Court and remembers the day when Chris went off to war. She recalls, in particular, that he had always had a naive belief that things work out well, a side that had been suppressed by his growing adult responsibilities: his inheritance of his father's business fifteen years earlier, his marriage to Kitty, and the death of his son. The two women are told that a visitor has come to see them, Margaret Grey, a shabby and plain woman who claims to have news that Chris has suffered from shell-shock. At first, the woman don't believe her, thinking it is a scheme to swindle money from them, but after Margaret produces a telegram, sent to Margaret's former home at Monkey Island, they change their minds.
The next morning, a letter arrives from Frank Baldry, another of Chris's cousins. Frank confirms that Chris has shell-shock, as well as amnesia that means he cannot remember any of the last 15 years, including his wife and dead child. A week later, Chris returns home, but his interactions with his wife and the once-familiar house are awkward. Eventually, he insists on seeing Margaret, a woman he had been in love with 15 years earlier. Kitty, believing that her beauty and wealth are no match for the frumpy Margaret, permits it. Jenny reassures Chris that Kitty really is his wife and his life with her is real. Chris, in turn, tells her that his love from Monkey Island was also real.
Jenny then tells the story of the two lovers on the island, as she reconstructs it from Chris's account. In a memorable scene, Margaret peers in through her own window and imagines not knowing about Chris's love.
From the rich town of Harrowweald, Jenny heads over to nearby Wealdstone, a poor, working-class place marked by industry, in order to fetch Margaret. On her way, Jenny see Chris boating as though he had returned to his boyhood. Jenny finds Margaret's miserable house, Mariposa (Spanish for "butterfly"), and meets her bumbling husband, William Grey. Jenny hears Margaret's side of the original affair, and learns that the two had a falling out when Chris mistook her friendship with another man. After Chris's departure and the death of Margaret's father, she left Monkey Island, with instructions to forward her mail. When she visits years later, the new owner gives her some letters from Chris that she never received, but it is too late: she had already married William. Margaret is increasingly convinced that Margaret is some kind of saint. The two women watch from the nursery window as Margaret and Chris run toward each other and embrace.
Kitty employs Dr. Gilbert Anderson, a psychoanalyst, to try and cure Chris of his amnesia. However, Jenny increasingly believes that Margaret is some kind of mystical blessing that has saved Chris, even though it has come at the expense of his connection to Kitty and Jenny. Jenny finds the two lovers in the woods, with Chris sleeping in Margaret's arms. She tells them about the doctor coming that afternoon.
Dr. Anderson talks with Chris, and concludes that the regression has occurred because, in his former life, he had unconsciously been deeply unhappy. Meanwhile, Margaret learns about Oliver, and reveals that she, too, had a son named Dick whose circumstances mirror those of Chris's son. She suggests that confronting Chris with the memory of Oliver would cure his amnesia. Jenny takes Margaret to the nursery and both women hesitate over whether they should bring Chris back: would it not be better for him to remain in his state of enchantment? Eventually they decide that facing up to reality is the more difficult but rewarding path, and so Margaret goes to show Chris his son's belongings. The strategy works: Chris walks back to the house with the air of a man and a soldier.
There is a provocative ambivalence to West's ending for, like in the aforementioned works by James, there is no satisfaction to be derived from what appears, by all conventions, to be a "desirable" ending. The inheritance of Milly Theale's money (in The Wings of the Dove) or the smashing of the golden bowl provide no resolution, except insofar as they delineate and harden the impossible paradoxes of the unhappy situations that gave rise to them in the first place.
The return of the soldier, the restoration of Chris Baldry's memory, is a brilliant repudiation of romantic and mystical ideas in their many forms - religious, sexual, social, and most of all, nationalistic. In a similar vein to D.H. Lawrence, but more incisively, West refutes the idealization of England as a country of pastoral idylls and rustic beauty.
The war is a symptom of England's underlying illness, an unacknowledged unhappiness that has repeatedly caused it to suppress reality in favor of an idealized past to which it insists on returning. In this respect, West's novel is not only brutally insightful about her own period, but the century or so that has passed since. England continues to live in a delusion of its past grandeur, against all evidence that such a time has passed, and while Chris finds his own bitter "cure" at the novel's end, I don't see this repeated cycle of regression ending any time soon. show less
Imagine if a teenager from a provincial background in the remote north, having dropped out of high school to devote her energies to activism for the biggest grass-roots protest movement of the day, were to start telling the world's great thinkers and statesmen where they have been going wrong all these years...
It's very tempting to make clumsy comparisons between Rebecca West's first, dynamite-laden, ventures into political and literary journalism in the early 20th century and our problems show more of a century later, and to reflect on how little has changed in the self-interested thick-headedness of the older generation and their (our) refusal to listen to rational argument and see the need for urgent change in the world.
Obviously, in reality, much has changed in the world since then. No paper these days would dare to print anything as outspoken as a Rebecca West book review uncensored: if they weren't sued for defamation by the author they would at least be permanently blacklisted by the publisher and lose all their advertising. They would never employ an underage contributor without a single formal educational qualification to her name, and if by some chance she did manage to get her political articles published, the world would be much more interested in seeing photographs of her Smooching with Famous Author than in the substance of her arguments...
This collection is divided roughly fifty-fifty between book reviews and political essays, mostly from 1911-1913 when it looked as though the women's suffrage campaign was close to a breakthrough, but carrying on into the war years (when her journalism was slowed down a bit by being out of London and looking after her young son).
On the literary side, everyone from Hall Caine, Strindberg and Mrs Humphrey Ward to forgotten popular novelists of the time gets a thorough pasting. Arnold Bennett, D H Lawrence and Ford Maddox Ford (Hueffer) are the only writers who get anything like thoroughly positive reviews (and in Bennett's case it's obviously at least in part done to provoke, because everyone else looks down on him). Other writers she admires, like Hardy and H G Wells, still get taken to task for major flaws in their books, especially in their representations of women. It's typical of her that she's just as savage with Wells after they became lovers as she was before they met: it clearly would never have crossed her mind to allow the person to get mixed up with the book.
The political articles are mostly about feminist issues and the suffrage campaign — West clearly has a huge amount of respect for the individual campaigners and takes every opportunity to remind us of the way they are being mistreated under Asquith's hard-line approach, but she also makes it clear that she feels the WSPU under the Pankhursts has made a disastrous strategic error by focussing on direct action by a small group of hardcore middle-class activists rather than building up mass working-class support and forcing the unions and the Labour Party to listen to women workers. (The collection also includes a biographical essay about Mrs Pankhurst written twenty years later, in which West acknowledges the huge contribution she and her daughters made to getting the suffrage campaign going, but maintains her reservations about the way the movement developed.)
Reading her account of the political manoeuvring around the suffrage issue, in particular the repeated betrayals of trust by Lloyd George, Ramsay McDonald and others and the way it all got tangled up with Ireland, it's again hard not to make comparisons with more recent events in the UK...
One constant theme in the essays is that the most urgent issue for women is not the vote, or access to higher education and professions, but equal pay. The fiction that women are only working to support themselves, and therefore don't need to earn as much as male "breadwinners", is what pushes so many women workers into hunger and poverty. Especially relevant in West's day, since this was before statutory old age pensions came in for most people, so many "single" women were actually supporting elderly parents by their work, whilst married women and widows were likely to be supporting children and often also unemployed or disabled husbands.
We also get some engaging diatribes about the arrogance of charitable trusts that see domestic service as the only career the girls in their care should be trained for, and about the urgent need for decent accommodation for young working women that treats them as responsible adults, away from the patronising evangelical monopoly of the YWCA. West has fun repeatedly puncturing the bubble of "the white slave trade", a form of crime that the press, Parliament and pressure groups spent endless amounts of time devising remedies for, even though there was no good reason to believe that it had ever existed.
It's fun to go back into these issues, some still active and relevant, others long-settled, but the real interest of course is West's devastatingly clear ability to set out her arguments on paper. She can be calm, passionate, funny, sophisticated or faux-naive as the occasion demands, but she always gets her message across to the reader and leaves you wondering how anyone could possibly disagree. As with all politically engaged writing, you have to remind yourself that the people who disagree probably never bothered to read it. Asquith might perhaps have had someone in his office look through the Freewoman, but he certainly never had it propped up against his coffee-pot in the mornings... show less
It's very tempting to make clumsy comparisons between Rebecca West's first, dynamite-laden, ventures into political and literary journalism in the early 20th century and our problems show more of a century later, and to reflect on how little has changed in the self-interested thick-headedness of the older generation and their (our) refusal to listen to rational argument and see the need for urgent change in the world.
Obviously, in reality, much has changed in the world since then. No paper these days would dare to print anything as outspoken as a Rebecca West book review uncensored: if they weren't sued for defamation by the author they would at least be permanently blacklisted by the publisher and lose all their advertising. They would never employ an underage contributor without a single formal educational qualification to her name, and if by some chance she did manage to get her political articles published, the world would be much more interested in seeing photographs of her Smooching with Famous Author than in the substance of her arguments...
This collection is divided roughly fifty-fifty between book reviews and political essays, mostly from 1911-1913 when it looked as though the women's suffrage campaign was close to a breakthrough, but carrying on into the war years (when her journalism was slowed down a bit by being out of London and looking after her young son).
On the literary side, everyone from Hall Caine, Strindberg and Mrs Humphrey Ward to forgotten popular novelists of the time gets a thorough pasting. Arnold Bennett, D H Lawrence and Ford Maddox Ford (Hueffer) are the only writers who get anything like thoroughly positive reviews (and in Bennett's case it's obviously at least in part done to provoke, because everyone else looks down on him). Other writers she admires, like Hardy and H G Wells, still get taken to task for major flaws in their books, especially in their representations of women. It's typical of her that she's just as savage with Wells after they became lovers as she was before they met: it clearly would never have crossed her mind to allow the person to get mixed up with the book.
The political articles are mostly about feminist issues and the suffrage campaign — West clearly has a huge amount of respect for the individual campaigners and takes every opportunity to remind us of the way they are being mistreated under Asquith's hard-line approach, but she also makes it clear that she feels the WSPU under the Pankhursts has made a disastrous strategic error by focussing on direct action by a small group of hardcore middle-class activists rather than building up mass working-class support and forcing the unions and the Labour Party to listen to women workers. (The collection also includes a biographical essay about Mrs Pankhurst written twenty years later, in which West acknowledges the huge contribution she and her daughters made to getting the suffrage campaign going, but maintains her reservations about the way the movement developed.)
Reading her account of the political manoeuvring around the suffrage issue, in particular the repeated betrayals of trust by Lloyd George, Ramsay McDonald and others and the way it all got tangled up with Ireland, it's again hard not to make comparisons with more recent events in the UK...
One constant theme in the essays is that the most urgent issue for women is not the vote, or access to higher education and professions, but equal pay. The fiction that women are only working to support themselves, and therefore don't need to earn as much as male "breadwinners", is what pushes so many women workers into hunger and poverty. Especially relevant in West's day, since this was before statutory old age pensions came in for most people, so many "single" women were actually supporting elderly parents by their work, whilst married women and widows were likely to be supporting children and often also unemployed or disabled husbands.
We also get some engaging diatribes about the arrogance of charitable trusts that see domestic service as the only career the girls in their care should be trained for, and about the urgent need for decent accommodation for young working women that treats them as responsible adults, away from the patronising evangelical monopoly of the YWCA. West has fun repeatedly puncturing the bubble of "the white slave trade", a form of crime that the press, Parliament and pressure groups spent endless amounts of time devising remedies for, even though there was no good reason to believe that it had ever existed.
It's fun to go back into these issues, some still active and relevant, others long-settled, but the real interest of course is West's devastatingly clear ability to set out her arguments on paper. She can be calm, passionate, funny, sophisticated or faux-naive as the occasion demands, but she always gets her message across to the reader and leaves you wondering how anyone could possibly disagree. As with all politically engaged writing, you have to remind yourself that the people who disagree probably never bothered to read it. Asquith might perhaps have had someone in his office look through the Freewoman, but he certainly never had it propped up against his coffee-pot in the mornings... show less
Wow. Such a small novel to pack such a wallop, from beginning to end.
This is my first West book and was also the first she published. At 24! I'm dumbfounded by that.
Most reviewers have mentioned the lyricism of her writing, and it's true. However, the sentence structure -- often very long sentences -- I found an effort to follow; more commas would have helped this lazy reader. Is this the way West always writes, I wondered. Is it some sort of Edwardian thing? Now I see the structure (and the show more reward for my dogged efforts to re-read the same sentence multiple times) was integral to the tale she was telling: a kind of stream of consciousness with the deliberate building of the private observations by the narrator, Jenny, until the brutal insights and impressions were rolled in that astute lyricism making you jolt at the often cruel meaning. And, paradoxically, the cruelty was the precise thing to invoke reader's compassion too. Jenny's astute description of the other two woman not only told us accurately about their lives and roles, but also unintentionally a brutal insight about herself and the precariousness of her own life.
The three women are stuck in an awful time in history (during WW I), firmly stuck within their restrictive roles, lives firmly defined by their relationship to men. Not one is to be envied by present day readers, nor even hated, although Kitty does appear the least sympathetic. One could, actually, make the case that Kitty deserves our sympathy most. She is the most stuck in her pre-defined life without any escape except down. And her life was not unfolding at all as it should. Shallow Kitty was also lacking the depth of heart to begin to understand the changes happening to her life or how to adapt to those changes. She is stuck in her suffering.
I'm especially glad I read the novel itself before the included 1997 Introduction by Samuel Hynes, the order which I normally do anyway. A "cold read" absolutely allowed The Return of the Soldier to play out every bit of talent and power it has rights to claim.
Rebecca West, I need to read more of your works. You were amazing. At 24! show less
This is my first West book and was also the first she published. At 24! I'm dumbfounded by that.
Most reviewers have mentioned the lyricism of her writing, and it's true. However, the sentence structure -- often very long sentences -- I found an effort to follow; more commas would have helped this lazy reader. Is this the way West always writes, I wondered. Is it some sort of Edwardian thing? Now I see the structure (and the show more reward for my dogged efforts to re-read the same sentence multiple times) was integral to the tale she was telling: a kind of stream of consciousness with the deliberate building of the private observations by the narrator, Jenny, until the brutal insights and impressions were rolled in that astute lyricism making you jolt at the often cruel meaning. And, paradoxically, the cruelty was the precise thing to invoke reader's compassion too. Jenny's astute description of the other two woman not only told us accurately about their lives and roles, but also unintentionally a brutal insight about herself and the precariousness of her own life.
The three women are stuck in an awful time in history (during WW I), firmly stuck within their restrictive roles, lives firmly defined by their relationship to men. Not one is to be envied by present day readers, nor even hated, although Kitty does appear the least sympathetic. One could, actually, make the case that Kitty deserves our sympathy most. She is the most stuck in her pre-defined life without any escape except down. And her life was not unfolding at all as it should. Shallow Kitty was also lacking the depth of heart to begin to understand the changes happening to her life or how to adapt to those changes. She is stuck in her suffering.
I'm especially glad I read the novel itself before the included 1997 Introduction by Samuel Hynes, the order which I normally do anyway. A "cold read" absolutely allowed The Return of the Soldier to play out every bit of talent and power it has rights to claim.
Rebecca West, I need to read more of your works. You were amazing. At 24! show less
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