Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Rebecca West
-
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.
Her literary friends of a generation before her own included George Meredith
, Rhoda Broughton
, and Henry James
. She participated in the friendship of the two last-named by being regularly at Broughton's house...
Friends, Associates
Victoria Cross
Possibly because VC
spent so much time travelling, it is difficult to judge the extent of her social circle. She is unmentioned by many literary autobiographies of the period. Charlotte Mitchell
suggests that she may...
Friends, Associates
Lucille Iremonger
LI
and her husband were correspondents both of Rebecca West
and of controversial Conservative MP Enoch Powell
.
“The Rebecca West Papers”. University of Tulsa: McFarlin Library: Department of Special Collections.
Janus. http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/.
Powell, John Enoch
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
By the time of the move to Tavistock Square, VW
began to socialize more than she had in years. She circulated with Bloomsbury familiars and (re)acquainted herself with Rebecca West
, Rose Macaulay
,...
Friends, Associates
Dora Russell
Sylvia Pankhurst
enrolled her son as a day-boy at Beacon Hill, and lived nearby while writing The Suffragette Movement; Beatrice
and Sidney Webb
, and G. B. Shaw
also visited. The school hosted annual...
Friends, Associates
Storm Jameson
The two women were friends through the 1930s and their relationship became increasingly intimate after the death of Winifred Holtby on 29 September 1935. Brittain stayed with Jameson and Chapman the night after Holtby died...
Friends, Associates
Violet Trefusis
Around the same period she began friendships with, among others, Edith
, Osbert
, and Sacheverell Sitwell
, Rebecca West
, and Nancy Cunard
. She writes in her memoir of the scintilliating Sitwell triumverate...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dervla Murphy
Here as usual DM
uses every possible means for understanding—history, geography, close observation of ordinary individuals and the precise conditions of their lives—in her account of this immensely complex and trouble-ridden region. She is able...
Intertextuality and Influence
Amelia Opie
The Critical Review thought The Soldier's Return and Brother and Sister the best of these stories, but only the best of a bad lot. The stories in general, it said, were tedious and insipid, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Laura Riding
Some of her early poems are nakedly autobiographical.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
32
She addressed a poem to Rebecca West
on reading her novel The Judge (1922), which sees West's compassionate solicitude moulding her book rather as God moulds...
Intertextuality and Influence
G. B. Stern
GBS
followed it with another dog novel, The Ugly Dachshund, in 1938 (illustrations by K. F. Barker
). After this came Dogs in an Omnibus, 1942 (again illustrated by the aptly-named Barker), which...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. M. Delafield
The diary abounds with references to contemporary literature, including several internal allusions to Time and Tide. The Provincial Lady engages in friendly rivalry over its competitions for readers and describes social encounters with the...
Intertextuality and Influence
G. B. Stern
GBS
opens the second Austen book with an amusing account of an interview with a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old niece who relates how she has fallen seriously in love with a dashing army officer who is her ideal...
Leisure and Society
Rumer Godden
With books hard to come by, RG
read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
207
Leisure and Society
Violet Hunt
VH
also involved herself with the short-lived journal, Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (1914-15).
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
212
Lewis, Wyndham, editor. Blast. Klaus Reprint Corporation.
prelims
She suggests in her memoir that she secured Rebecca West
's short story Indissoluble Matrimony for the journal's first issue.