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, 1 review
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 — 1,106 copies, 34 reviews
Mistress to an age : a life of Madame de Staël (1958) — Introduction, some editions — 322 copies, 4 reviews
The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1997) — Contributor — 216 copies, 1 review
On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (1989) — Contributor — 114 copies, 1 review
The New Yorker Book of War Pieces: London, 1939 to Hiroshima, 1945 (1988) — Contributor — 100 copies, 2 reviews
The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2 (1991) — Contributor — 98 copies, 3 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
- 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 ∙ 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)
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
Schwob Nederland (1)
THE WAR ROOM (1)
Backlisted (1)
Women in War (1)
War Literature (1)
Hidden Classics (1)
Spirituality (1)
First Novels (1)
Female Author (2)
1910s (1)
Short and Sweet (1)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 47
- Also by
- 29
- Members
- 7,971
- Popularity
- #3,040
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 194
- ISBNs
- 334
- Languages
- 9
- Favorited
- 31