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.
GBS
moved in literary and artistic circles in London before the first World War. She visited Rebecca West
at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex in September 1917 during a week of air-raids.
Grant, Joy. Stella Benson: A Biography. Macmillan, 1987.
251
Friends, Associates
Laura Riding
Graves and Riding were touchy as friends, between their sense of literary mission (they saw Graves's biography of T. E. Lawrence
as a somewhat demeaning potboiler, not part of his real work at all) and...
VH
greatly admired West
, and used their interaction as a spring board from which she delved into issues about women and writing. In 1926, for instance, she compared West physically and intellectually to George Sand
Friends, Associates
Dora Marsden
During the 1920s DM
's primary focus was her writing, which she continued mainly in isolation and under much mental and physical stress. However, she was assisted in this by Harriet Shaw Weaver
and Sylvia Beach
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...
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
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
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
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
Laura Riding
Some of her early poems are nakedly autobiographical.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
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...
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, 1987.
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, 1990.
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.
