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.
Compton-Burnett always retained the capacity of being difficult. Elizabeth Taylor describes at second hand her refusal, in about 1959, to extend the hand of friendship to Rebecca West
. Rebecca was apparently at her most...
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...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
H. G. Wells
Wells wrote about characters who defied conventional morality. In his own life, he married twice, and had a busy extramarital sexual career. He writes about this himself in the second volume of his autobiography (published...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Cecily Mackworth
CM
later wrote that the search for love was interwoven with many events of her life; she felt her judgement was poor in matters of the heart, and connected this with the loss of her...
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte Mew
There has been much speculation, both at the time and more recently, about the nature of the relationship between the two writers. CM
seems to have fallen in love, but Sinclair was not receptive, not...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Marsden
Jardine became Marsden's assistant and for a number of years the two lived together (sometimes with Hannah Marsden
) in London, Southport, and Blackburn. In her Time and Tide piece on Marsden...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Hunt
VH
marked several points of decline in her relationship with Ford
. She told Rebecca West
that Ford was somewhat repelled
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
220
by her after he learned in 1914 that she had syphilis. She also...
Family and Intimate relationships
Fay Weldon
During her marriage she and Edgar entertained the literary and avant-garde world: she later regaled her grand-daughter with irreverent stories of Joseph Conrad
, Jean Rhys
(Such a louche young woman),
While in EdinburghKC
attended George Watson's College
, where she was acutely conscious of feeling like an outsider owing to her lack of interest in sports and her bookishness and posh accent.
Jinks, Peter. “Muse turns tables”. Scotland on Sunday.
Scott, Jane. “By Virtue Of An Explosive Arts Debut”. The Herald.
Described as...
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
Cultural formation
Dora Marsden
This constant mobility did not preclude DM
from forming loving relationships with several women at this time, however, apart from the constant support provided by her mother
. Rona Robinson
, a close friend from...
