by Rebecca West
“Oh,”—how could I say it,—”every inch a soldier.”
She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction. “He’s cured!” she whispered slowly. “He’s cured!”
THE END
REBECCA WEST
Rebecca West, née Cicily Isabel Fairfield, was born in 1892 in London to a distinguished family that was living in a state of relative poverty. Her mother, Isabella, was a pianist whose considerable talents went unrecognized, and her father, Charles, a charming and good-natured man, was an army officer who was forced to resign his commission for financial reasons and pursue a career in journalism. Charles’s best qualities were overshadowed by his reckless irresponsibility and an inability to support his family. When Cicily was ten, her father abandoned the family, only to die suddenly several months later. In desperation, her mother moved with her three daughters from London, where the family had moved shortly after Cicily’s birth, to Edinburgh, where she struggled, with the help of relatives, to provide her daughters with an education and a genteel upbringing.
While in Edinburgh, Cicily attended an undistinguished ladies’ college, eventually returning to London to complete her education at the Royal Academy of Art, where she studied drama. It was during Cicily’s brief career as an actress in the following year, 1910, that she played the part of Rebecca West, the feisty heroine of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm, with whom young Cicily identified strongly enough to adopt the name as her pseudonym when she began writing in 1911 for the feminist magazine Freewoman.Within two years, West was writing for several other publications, including Clarion, a widely read Socialist newspaper. Although her articles often centered on feminism and politics, she also published book reviews in which she unflinchingly criticized writers with whom she took issue and praised with equal fervor those whom she appreciated. Although West’s early writing is often criticized for its vehemence and somewhat untutored style that could obscure clear reasoning, many critics point to these same traits as proof that political polemic was her natural calling.
Among her many early book reviews was a scathing critique of H. G. Wells, which was so pointed that Wells himself took an interest in her. After they met in 1912, they began a relationship that lasted more than a decade and resulted in the birth of a son, Anthony. Throughout the duration of their romance, H. G. Wells was still married to his second wife. One of a succession of mistresses in a relationship never openly acknowledged, not even to their son, West found herself burdened with the rearing of a child almost entirely without his father’s support.
She continued her literary criticism in her first full-length work, Henry James (1916), a critical review of James’s entire corpus. It is an equal admixture of criticism and praise, alternately condemning his obsession with the upper class and extolling his keen insight into human nature.
Her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), critically praised as one of her finest works, follows the homecoming of a shell-shocked veteran and the effect his return has on the lives of three women. Her style of expression and the complex psychological interplay of the three women, one of whom serves as the story’s narrator, clearly show James’s influence on her technique.
Her second novel, The Judge (1922), was much less successful and was met with a decidedly unenthusiastic critical reception. It follows a love affair between Ellen Melville, a secretary in Edinburgh, and Richard Yaverland, a wealthy businessman, as they endure a series of family tragedies. The novel’s failings are often explained as the result of difficulties faced by West at the time of its composition, including the slow decline and death of her mother and her now strained relationship with H. G. Wells, whose scathing reviews of the book were driven, at least in part, by malice. Shortly after the publication of The Judge their relationship finally came to an end. Although West, in the wake of their breakup, came to openly acknowledge her son, Anthony never forgave her for what he saw as neglect and indifference during his childhood, harboring deep resentment toward her throughout his life.
Her next major work, Harriet Hume (1929), is an experimental novel chronicling the psychology of a relationship between two Londoners amid shifting settings of time and location. West depicts the lovers’ opposing objectives both as personal struggles and as representative of their sex.
In 1930, West married a banker, Henry Andrews. With his support, both emotionally and financially, she entered the most productive and satisfying period of writing in her career. She found in Andrews a companion who truly cared for her well-being and who worked devotedly to support her talents. At this time, West’s interests turned from fiction to biography and she wrote a series of short biographical pieces on writers, including D. H. Lawrence (1930), Arnold Bennett Himself (1931), and St. Augustine (1933).
It was in 1936, with the publication of The Thinking Reed, that West achieved widespread success in fiction. Through the course of the narrative, the central character, Isabelle, who serves as the story’s narrator, undergoes a series of traumas through which her understanding and compassion deepen. The novel depicts humans as fundamentally flawed creatures who are absolved only through their self-awareness and consciousness of their faults. This understanding of human frailty was a recurring theme in many of her later nonfiction works such as The Meaning of Treason (1947), which reported on the trials of Nazi sympathizers in Britain, andA Train of Powder (1955), a collection of essays that covered the Nuremberg trials.
As a result of two trips to Eastern Europe made with her husband in the late 1930s, West produced the epic-length Black Lamband Grey Falcon (1941). Half travel narrative and half a sociological and political study of contemporary Yugoslavia, this acclaimed work describes the cultures and customs at odds with one another and foreshadows their inevitable and bloody clash.
The Fountain Overflows (1956), marking West’s return to fiction after a hiatus of two decades, is widely considered to be her most successful novel. Amid a backdrop of exquisite detail, it follows the trails of the Aubreys, a respectable but impecunious family in London at the turn of the nineteenth century that bears a clear resemblance to West’s family following her father’s death. The father’s irresponsibility leaves him unable to support his family, and the mother, Clare, regrets not having pursued her musical talents. Despite her circumstances, she perseveres in educating her daughters, who become successful and talented musicians.
It was in 1959, three years after the publication of The Fountain Overflows, that West’s achievements were officially recognized when she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire.
In her last novel, The Birds Fall Down (1966), West explores the psychology of a double agent and the effect his secret life has on those around him. It was during the composition of The Birds Fall Down that West returned to London and nursed her husband through the illness that cost him his life in 1968.
Her last book, 1900 (1982), is a social, political, and cultural history recounting the major events of the year that served as a bridge between the Victorian world of her childhood and the new world of the modern day. Bemoaning the lost simplicity of the nineteenth century, 1900 is filled with ominous foreshadowing of the events that were to characterize the first half of the twentieth century, balanced against the sense of inevitable progress that would see substantial improvement in the conditions of those oppressed or overlooked by the Victorians.
Rebecca West died in 1983 in London, where she had lived since her husband’s death fifteen years earlier. When critics cast their eyes over West’s achievements, they are often hard-pressed to accurately characterize the career of a woman that spanned the better part of a century and whose curiosity led her to produce a uniquely varied body of work. Though critics have often assigned priority of place to West’s nonfiction at the expense of her novels, it has been successfully argued that the talents that drove West to write fiction were the same that gave such depth and vitality to her nonfiction. Though West’
s legacy may arouse as much controversy as her first articles on suffrage and feminism, there can be little doubt that the woman whom Diana Trilling called “one of the major figures of this century” has assured herself a place among the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
