Rebecca West

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Standard Name: West, Rebecca
Birth Name: Cicily Isabel Fairfield
Nickname: Cissie
Nickname: Anne
Nickname: Panther
Nickname: Rac
Pseudonym: Rebecca West
Married Name: Cicily Isabel Andrews
Used Form: R*b*cc* W*st
Rebecca West rose to fame early (before the First World War) through her witty, acerbic journalism. In addition to numerous essays and reviews, she wrote about a dozen novels, short stories, political analyses, a classic travel book, and works of literary criticism. Her journalism remains an important commentary on the contemporary women's movement, offering both strong intellectual support and trenchant satire. She is known for her pungency of phrase; on occasion she was more eager for a phrase to strike shockingly home than for it to withstand criticism.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Leisure and Society Violet Hunt
VH chose to dress in bold colours prominent in the Vorticist aesthetic, and commissioned Wyndham Lewis , one of the movement's leaders, to create an abstract decoration for one of her rooms. West described the...
Literary responses Catherine Carswell
Reaction to this book was fiercely negative among traditional Burnsites, especially in Scotland. CC received threats to her well-being, including one letter signed Holy Willy (after a character satirised by Burns) and containing a...
Literary responses Muriel Spark
The book went into a third reprinting within two months. It was on the short-list for the first Booker Prize.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
356
It was well-received—as an economical, witty, and ironic exploration of a significant ethical subject—by...
Literary responses Catherine Carswell
Reviews were mixed. Rebecca West , reviewing the book before the libel charges, felt that CC overdid her loyalty to Lawrence.
Pilditch, Jan. Catherine Carswell. A Biography. John Donald.
142
Virginia Woolf , having at first thought the book interesting, changed her mind...
Literary responses Christina Stead
British and American reviewers liked the modernist eccentricity of these stories. Reviews in Australia, however, tended to dismiss them on grounds of a failure in realism.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Richard Denis Charques in the Times Literary Supplement...
Literary responses Violet Hunt
VH 's associate Rebecca West had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
Literary responses Christina Stead
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (the same who had hailed Stead the short-story writer as an impressive new talent) ranked her novel far lower. Even though he found here curiosity, wit, delight in words, and...
Literary responses Pamela Frankau
PF 's new agent had accomplished the whole process of selling this book before he had time to read it. He then reminded her that she had her forebears (grandmother and father) to beat; that...
Literary responses Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...
Literary responses Pamela Frankau
After her death an ordinary . . . housewife wrote to Diana Raymond, calling herself representative of all those who had found especial magic in PF 's writing.
Raymond, Diana, and Pamela Frankau. “Introduction”. The Winged Horse, Virago, p. v - xiii.
v
Rebecca West wrote regretfully in an...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Rebecca West 's review of the original edition was the means of bringing the two writers back into contact in 1974.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
432
The reprint was welcomed by Harry Mathews in the New York Review of...
Literary responses E. M. Delafield
Rebecca West reviewed the book in The Daily Telegraph, calling it [a]n admirable novel. Nobody has ever written so well about the kind of English people who live in big houses since Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
Literary responses Flora Macdonald Mayor
Reviewers called this apparently unreadable,
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
4045 (10 October 1980): 1142
and judged its quality so poor that [it is] hard to believe it was written by FMM at all.
Hill, Susan, and Flora Macdonald Mayor. The Third Miss Symons, Virago, p. n.p.
prelims
Rebecca West was the...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Among many personal replies was one from Naomi Mitchison , who visited Riding to argue that women are not innately inside but have been made so by being kept out of public activities, that politics...
Literary responses Elizabeth von Arnim
Her first publication also initiated a taste for gardening books with a hands-on approach to natural landscaping: Gertrude Jekyll published the first of her many gardening books, Wood and Garden, in 1899, and included...

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