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
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 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...
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
This novel elicited a wide range of responses from reviewers. John Middleton Murry consoled EA when she received harsh criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He told her there was no way to protect...
Literary responses Katherine Mansfield
After Mansfield's death, Woolf wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, pp. 25-6.
25
KM appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Literary responses Ethel M. Dell
The implications of homosexual paedophilia (whose existence Dell was almost certainly unaware of) caused merriment rather than scandal. Rebecca West published in the New Statesman a few years later an article entitled The Posh Horse...
Literary responses Mary Gawthorpe
She took it in good part when Teresa Billington told her when one of her most headlong and disorganized speeches (given after taking a doctor's prescription for exhaustion) was pretty bad,
Gawthorpe, Mary. Up Hill to Holloway. Traversity Press.
234
and set...
Literary responses Elizabeth von Arnim
Rebecca West wrote in the New Statesman that in this novel EA had lapsed back into the unplumbed seas of artificial femininity.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
Despite unenthusiastic reviews, the novel quickly became a bestseller and was a...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot wrote in a letter that VW had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus.
444
Arnold Bennett

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