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.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Rebecca West looking straight forward, wearing a checked jacket with dark cuffs and collar and white flowers pinned at the neckline. With one hand she touches a chunky metal necklace. Her wavy, greying hair, jaw-length, is pushed behind her ears.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 Viola Meynell
In her review, Rebecca West wrote that she found the work marred by an almost demented cosmopolitanism. It gives the impression that England is entirely inhabited by Roumanians with French mistresses, and Baltic barons.
qtd. in
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen, 2002.
230
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 Storm Jameson
Margaret B. McDowell wrote that while Jameson's first novels sold well, they served a greater importance as her apprentice writing. They garnered increasingly positive reviews as she began to mature as a writer. Rebecca West
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 Nina Hamnett
Rebecca West was not charmed: her review likened NH to a character in Evelyn Waugh 's Vile Bodies and commented on the book's idiot gusto curiously combined with a strong suicidal impulse.
qtd. in
Booth-Clibborn, Edward, and Nina Hamnett. “Introduction”. Laughing Torso, Virago, 1984, p. v - x.
v
Alan Clutton-Brock
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
The novel was well received. In the AthenæumKatherine Mansfield congratulated EB for creating a pioneer who sees, feels, thinks, hears, and yet is herself full of the sap of life.
qtd. in
Bagnold, Enid, and Laurian Jones. National Velvet. W. Heinemann, 1935.
back cover
qtd. in
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
76
Rebecca West
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire was not entirely welcome to VSW , since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
Literary responses Jan Morris
She was honoured in Wales by election in 1993 to the Gorsedd or supposedly throned assembly of bards (taking the bardic name of Jan Trefan) and by the award in 2016 of the medal...
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.
qtd. in
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
444
Arnold Bennett
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
EB 's biographer Anne Sebba notes that although Serena Blandish is offensive to contemporary readers, it was in its own time received as no more than a bitter comedy of manners, blithely caputuring the wicked...
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
VSW received personal congratulations on her stories from Sir Edmund Gosse and John Galsworthy . Among reviewers the only unfavourable voice was that of Rebecca West . S. P. B. Mais in the Daily Express...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Orlando set a new level in VW 's public reputation. The usual polarization of reviews was represented by J. C. Squire in The Observer calling it a very pleasant trifle that would entertain the drawing-rooms...
Literary responses Arnold Bennett
By 1930, AB was feeling frustrated at the critical and editorial reactions to his work, the attention focussed exclusively on only four among almost twenty times that many titles: The Old Wives' Tale, The...
Literary responses Eleanor Farjeon
This was the first of EF 's books to meet with success, and it set the course for her professional life. A favourable review by Rebecca West was crucial in its early reception, and Farjeon's...

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