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.
On the publication of London War NotesNoël Coward
wrote to tell MPD
that her evocation of the city in wartime, nearly thirty years in the past, was so well done that he felt sodden...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
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...
Friends, Associates
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Once settled in a larger house more suited to entertaining, CADS
renewed old friendships and made new ones with luminaries in London literary society, including Beatrice Harraden
, Arthur Waugh
, H. G. Wells
,...
death
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Tributes to the founder of PEN
poured in from writers and friends such as Louis Golding
, Rebecca West
, and Karel Capek
.
Watts, Marjorie, and Frances King. Mrs. Sappho. Duckworth.
203-5
Friends, Associates
May Sinclair
Her articles and critical reviews were encouraging for many writers, including T. S. Eliot
.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Indiana University Press.
85
Sinclair also made the acquaintance of other women writers, including Alice Meynell
, Ida Wylie
(a close friend), Rebecca West
Literary responses
May Sinclair
A nurse who had worked with, but did not belong to, the Motor Field Ambulance Corps
disagreed strongly with MS
's version of some of the events described. After an initial exchange of letters she...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
The subject-matter of this novel brought it a notice in the Psychoanalytic Review. Rebecca West
, in another review, complained about a doctor (Jerrold's brother) being introduced to explain the actions of other characters...
Textual Features
Ali Smith
The volume features 101 different women writers, each publication emblematic of the year for which its author is featured. Its contents range from the title-inspiring Miles Franklin
's My Brilliant Career (1901) through Edith Wharton
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...
