Rebecca West was one of the major literary figures of the 20th century, known for her lifelong commitment to feminist issues. The youngest of three daughters, West was born Cicely Fairfield on this day 1892 in Ireland.Her father, Charles Fairfield, was a lieutenant in the British army, a convicted gold and silver thief, and a highly-regarded Conservative journalist who, despite being a feature writer for the Melbourne Argus and having a brief stint as chief leader-writer of the Glasgow Herald. never made much of his literary abilities West’s mother Isabel had, according to West, all of the makings of a concert pianist, but never pursued a professional career. Both parents, however, encouraged West’s interests in art, politics, and debate.
Following West’s father’s death the family moved to Edinburgh, where she attended George Watson’s Ladies College. After leaving school in 1907 due to contracting tuberculosis, West moved to London looking to begin a career as an actress and adopted the professional name Rebecca West – borrowing the name from Ibsen’s strong-minded feminist heroine in Rosmersholm.
West was a passionate suffragist, a socialist and fiercely intelligent and her long career as a writer began when she was barely out of her teens.but her move to London was a turning point. She joined the Freewoman Circle, a group of suffragists who published a feminist journal, and then discovered the Fabian Society and the socialist newspaper The Clarion. For both publications she wrote articles and reviews, attracting immediate attention with her incisive prose.
One of her admirers was the Fabian H. G. Wells, a novelist twenty-six years older than she was, and they embarked on an intense affair. But in 1914, one year into the relationship, the arrival of a son Anthony Panther West. (The unusual choice of middle name, Panther, was the pet name Wells had for West.) heralded the end of their unmitigated happiness.
Wells was unwilling to acknowledge his illegitimate son and banished West to the countryside. Resenting this treatment, West waited for the end of the war and then rented a flat of her own in London. Her independence brought some measure of contentment, but the relationship remained fraught with disagreements.Their romantic relationship ended after a decade, but in spite of this Wells and West remained friends until his death in 1946.
Wests relationship with both father and son were stormy.Her son resented her absences from him during his childhood, yet never blamed his father for even more prolonged absences. He rather idolized his father, and grew up to be a talented writer.In 1955, Anthony West wrote Heritage,thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a son torn between two hugely famous parents. and portrayed his mother in a very unflattering light West threatened legal action against any publishing house that bought the novel and subsequently it wasn’t published until after West’s death.
Among her other lovers were Charlie Chaplin and Lord Beaverbrook, a newspaper tycoon. As a witty and beautiful woman, men were drawn to her wherever she went on her far-flung travels.
As a young socialist and feminist, West lived, worked and took action through her writing. With a fertile imagination, mischievous wit and some self-indulgent verbosity, West's articles for feminist weeklies attacked, with savage refinement, the repression of suffragists by politicians and police, especially the barbaric force-feeding of suffragist prisoners on hunger strike.
West defended trade unions, especially their efforts to organise women workers, and also argued for the need for the suffragist movement to link the demand for the vote w
West quickly won a reputation for witty and cutting journalism, and became aligned with socialist and feminist movements. She went on to write for The New Republic, New Statesman and Daily Telegraph and would be affiliated with feminist and socialist causes throughout her life.
In 1918 West published her first novel, The Return of the Soldier followed by T"he Judge" (1922) reflected her ability to address pressing social issues, from the effeT"he Judge"cts of shell shock on soldiers to the circumstances of single mothers and feminist militancy. However "The Judge" did not please all her readers, and the trials of writing it, combined with the negative reviews it received, brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Her subsequent novels, all considered extremely fine yet undervalued by critics, included Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and The Birds Fall Down (1966).Though she was prolific in her journalistic writing, fiction, for most of her life, cost her a great deal of pain and effort.
Rebecca West is is now considered one of the great minds of the twentieth century. She looked at the human condition with the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the heart of a feminist. For example, from a 1928 speech to the Fabian Society: “There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.”
She was an ardent feminist as she puts it below,
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute”) but also a spirited and independent thinker. She was not afraid to attack or mock the suffragist movement when necessary, but she was also one of its most vivid voices. (She once made fun of one of the feminists from the New Freewoman “who was always jumping up and asking us to be kind to illegitimate children, as if we all made a habit of seeking out illegitimate children and insulting them!”)
Her fierce feminist inquiries were original and inflammatory; she was not content with slogans and bromides, and went deeper than other politically progressive women of her time, and in fact, our time. She wrote, for instance, a provocative attack on women, herself included, for devoting too much of their energy to love and relationships in the New Republic, denouncing them for “keeping themselves apart from the high purposes of life for an emotion that, schemed and planned for, was no better than the made excitement of drunkenness.”
In 1930, when she was thirty-seven years old, West married a banker named Henry Andrews.
West continued to take a keen interest in politics and was a supporter of the Popular Front governm ent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She joined with Emma Goldman, Sybil Thorndyke, Fenner Brockway and C. E. M. Joad to establish the Committee to Aid Homeless Spanish Women and Children. ith the needs of working women. West also took o
Her new husband had spent his childhood in Germany and been interned there during World War I. Spurred by his stories, West observed Hitler’s growing influence in Europe with deep apprehension and a reporter’s interest that led to much of her most interesting non-fiction, that left an indelible mark, especially Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a monumental work on Balkan history and culture, and in 1946 she reported on the trial for treason of William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”) for The New Yorker magazine. Published as The Meaning of Treason , it examined not only the traitor’s role in modern society but also the roles of the intellectual and the scientist. Later she published a similar collection, The New Meaning of Treason (1964). Her brilliant reports on the Nürnberg trials were collected in A Train of Powder (1955)
Bonnie Kime Scott has pointed out: "Rebecca West has gradually gained recognition as a perceptive and independent interpreter of literature...
West's accounts of literature and culture are typically grounded in philosophical paradigms and cultural diagnoses that invite critical study today. She found pervasive examples of Manichaeism, and j
After the Second World War West became more conservative in her political views and wrote for the Daily Telegraph and the New Yorker.
West's decline from socialist to conservative anticommunist is one of the more tragically wasteful of such falls. She flirts with Lord Beaverbrook, millionaire capitalist and media mogul. She votes Labour in 1945 but can't sleep because of the Communist bogey, supposedly revealed in Soviet infiltration of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the Times (which she describes as "a Communist Party organ") and "most of the BBC". whilst Admiral Rickover sends her details of each new US nuclear submarine deployed to fight the "red menace".
Some of her work was extremely anti-communist and some critics, including Arthur Schlesinger and J. B. Priestley, accused of her being in sympathy with McCarthyism - a charge she denied.
West finds solace in "law and order", taking furious exception to spies for their treason against the state. She also finds solace in the monarchy; it's off to Buck Palace with a new hat and facial in a rented Daimler in 1949 to interview Princess Elizabeth about her wedding, and again in 1959 to be knighted with feudal baubles.
In the latter decades of her life, sadly though still untiring and determined as ever, West continued to write about events all over the world her socialist fire had well and truly been extinguished and became increasingly frail and lost eyesight in her last years.
Rebecca West died on 15th March 1983 at 48 Kingston House North, South Kensington at the age of 90...a Dame of the British Empire still bemoaning the fraught relationship with her son on her deathbed She was buried at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking. Rebecca
Despite her her flaws and many contradictions ,Known for her elegant fiction, and forceful personal style, West should also be known as a unorthodox thinker and daring social critic. that made her one of the most fascinating and controversial voices of the 20th century.
