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 Christina Stead
British and American reviewers liked the modernist eccentricity of these stories. Reviews in Australia, however, tended to dismiss them on grounds of a failure in realism.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Richard Denis Charques in the Times Literary Supplement...
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...
Friends, Associates G. B. Stern
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.
Stern, G. B. Monogram. Chapman and Hall.
268ff
Several decades later she...
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...
Textual Features G. B. Stern
A listing of books which GBS feels to be particularly her own includes Jane Austen , Edna St Vincent Millay , Dorothy Parker , and Rebecca West 's essays. But most of the women authors...
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...
Travel Violet Trefusis
In late 1927, Violet travelled with the same party through the United States. They had tea at the White House and saw Rebecca West while in Washington, DC.
Jullian, Philippe et al. Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters. Hamish Hamilton.
69-70
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...
Textual Features Una Troubridge
UT wrote much of her 1914 diary in Italian. After 1915, her diaries document her relationship with Radclyffe Hall , touching on the two women's health, families, travels, and social activities. She also writes about...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth von Arnim
EA and H. G. Wells were lovers, though the relationship was strained: Jane Wells did not intend to divorce her husband, and it was during this time that he became involved with Rebecca West as...
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 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 Doreen Wallace
Response was gratifying. The Times Literary Supplement, apparently categorizing DW as a regional novelist, said that she describes the countryside and country people with accuracy and feeling, yet she does not sentimentalize or overstress...
Literary responses Evelyn Waugh
Rebecca West , reviewing this novel at its first appearance, extolled the character of Grimes as one of the world's great rogues.
Stovel, Bruce, and Bruce Stovel. “The Genesis of Evelyn Waugh’s Comic Vision. Waugh, Captain Grimes, and <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Decline and Fall</span&gt”;. Jane Austen and Company: Collected Essays, edited by Nora Foster Stovel and Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta Press, pp. 181-0.
181
Critic Bruce Stovel has pointed out that, extraordinarily, neither West nor any...

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