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) 26 copies
The Return of the Soldier [1982 film] — Original book — 8 copies
War Nurse: The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (1930) — Author — 6 copies
A Letter to a Grandfather 5 copies
Indissoluble Matrimony 2 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 — 1,090 copies
Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul (2002) — Contributor — 25 copies
Agenda : Wyndham Lewis special issue — Contributor — 6 copies
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
- Burial location
- Brookwood Cemetery, Brookwood, Woking, Surrey, England, UK
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- London, England, UK
- Place of death
- London, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Ibston, Buckinghamshire, England, UK - Education
- George Watson's Ladies College
Academy of Dramatic Art - Occupations
- writer
author
novelist
Time and Tide (director) - Relationships
- West, Anthony (son)
Wells, H. G. (lover)
Fairfield, Letitia (sister)
West, Henry Maxwell (husband) - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary â Literature â 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)
Legion d'Honneur
Benson Medal (1966) - 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.
Members
Discussions
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
Lists
THE WAR ROOM (1)
First Novels (1)
Schwob Nederland (1)
War Literature (1)
Backlisted (1)
Women in War (1)
Short and Sweet (1)
Spirituality (1)
Hidden Classics (1)
1910s (1)
Female Author (2)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 47
- Also by
- 29
- Members
- 7,764
- Popularity
- #3,140
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 190
- ISBNs
- 335
- Languages
- 10
- Favorited
- 30
This is a war novel, but we are never at the front, and the focus is not on the soldier, Chris, but on the three women in his life--his wife Kitty, his cousin and childhood companion Jenny (who is also the narrator), and his first love Margaret. When the novel opens Kitty and Jenny are at Chris's estate, and he is away at the front, when they receive a visit from Margaret, a dowdy, lower-class woman who informs them that Chris has been wounded.
At first Kitty and Jenny refuse to believe Margaret, this drudge they have never heard of--why wasn't Kitty as Chris's wife informed of this by the war office? But it turns out to be true. Chris is shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia--he does not remember his wife Kitty or that they had a child who died. What he does remember is Margaret, his first love, who is now the dowdy woman who visited Kitty and Jenny.
Chris is returned to his estate to recuperate and to recover his memories. Despite various attempts to convince him that he is married to Kitty, he is happy only in the company of Margaret. Though she looks old, worn, and poor, she has an inner peace about her, and Chris sees, not her worn physical appearance but the inner glow that comes through. Kitty never warms to Margaret and wants only to bring Chris back to the present, even though "curing" him will mean sending him back to the front. Jenny wavers between letting Chris live happily in the past with Margaret or bringing him back to the present reality.
Although this is a war novel, we see and experience little of the war; instead we see the devastating effects of the war, what it does to one's senses, both to a soldier and to civilians. There is also a lot in this short novel about the struggle between the classes. It was very much grating on me to read how disdainfully Jenny and especially Kitty spoke about Margaret: "They hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day...." The book was somewhat different from what I was expecting, but I'm glad I read it.
3 stars… (more)