Rebecca West Biography and List of Works

English journalist, novelist and critic. Her companion for ten years was H.G.Wells. Their son Anthony also established himself as a noted author and critic. West is perhaps best known for her reports on the Nürenberg trials (1945-46). She started her career as a columnist for the suffragist weekly the Freewoman in the 1910s. Kenneth Tynan described her in 1954 as "the best journalist alive."

"Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days?"
(from 'The Sterner Sex', 1913)

West was born in London of Scottish-Irish parentage. She was educated in Edinburgh and later trained as an actress at the Academy of Dramatic Art, from which she emerged to pursue a brief and unsuccessful acting career. From Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm West adopted the name of the passionate, self-willed heroine.

In 1911 West started to contribute to left-wing press, and joined the staff of the feminist paper Freewoman. She resigned after four months and became the leading writer on the socialist magazine Clarion, also writing for The Star, Daily News and The New Statesman. West's subject matter ran from social issues to book reviews. In 1913 she wrote about the suffragist Emily Davidson, who threw herself in front of the king's horse at the Derby. West's essay about Emmeline Pankhurst, 'A Reed of Steel' (1933) is among her best works of the period. Her first book was about the writer Henry James.

West's turbulent love affair with H.G. Wells started in 1913 when she was 19. Charlie Chaplin and the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook were among West's many lovers. In 1930 she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews - their marriage was happy although plagued by a series of illnesses. He died in 1968. From 1930 to 1968 West lived in Buckinghamshire, and then in London.

West's first novel, THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER, was published in 1918. Several of her novels were marked by a feminist point of view. The Return of the Soldier centres on three women who labour to cure a soldier of shell-shock-induced amnesia. The soldiers cannot remember the last 15 years of his life, including his marriage. THE JUDGE (1922) is a chronicle of illegitimacies and feminine suffering, HARRIET HUME (1929) is a fantasy, THE THINKING REED (1936) explores the manners of the very rich, and THE BIRDS FALL DOWN (1966) views political and marital intrigue through the eyes of a young girl. THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS (1956) focuses on an Edwardian family and is partly autobiographical. The protagonist is Rose Aubrey who tells the story of her childhood in South London. Rose worships her father, who gambles and creates an atmosphere of insecurity in the family run by her artistic, serious mother.

In 1937 she travelled to Yugoslavia with her husband and published BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON (1942, 2 vols.), a polemic pro-Serbian travel diary. West was convinced of the inevitability of the Second World War and the book was coloured by her dark anticipations. During the war she was a talks supervisor at the BBC in London. Her writings on the Nürenberg trials were collected in A TRAIN OF POWDER (1955). She describes the Nazi leaders in a dubious sexual context: Goering was "like a madam in a brothel," and Streicher was "a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks."

West's essays of Britons who worked for Germany during World War II and the treason of William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw", appeared in THE MEANING OF TREASON (1949). Although West had written for socialist newspapers in the beginning of her career, in the 1950s she defended McCarthyism and the crusade against Communists in the U.S.A. West's other non-fiction includes THE STRANGE JECESSITY (1928), in which she explores theories of creativity and cognition, and ST. AUGUSTINE (1933), a study of the impact of the medieval philosopher on the Western thinking.

"Yes, I've been destroyed. Yes, I'm maimed for life. But for other people, for the whole world, it isn't so. For them life's getting better and better all the time. Look at Russia. It's coming out into the light, every year the sun shines on it more brightly."
(from The Birds Fall Down, 1966)

West was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1959. Her literary career spanned more than seventy years. West's writing illustrates a brilliance of intellect and lucidity of style. At the end of her life she was England's foremost woman of letters. West died in London on March 15, 1983.

For further reading: The Novels of Rebecca West by M. Orlich (1967); Rebecca West by P. Wolfe (1971); H.G. Wells and Rebecca West by G.N. Ray (1974); Rebecca West by Motley F. Deakinn (1980); Rebecca West by V. Glendinning (1987); Rebecca West: A Life by Carl E. Rollyson (1996); The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West by Carl Rollyson (1997); Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West by Ann V. Norton (1999)

HENRY JAMES, (1916)