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West, Rebecca, 1892-1983

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Dame Rebecca West, DBE (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983), whose real name was Cicely (she later changed it to "Cicily") Isabel Fairfield, was a British-Irish suffragist and writer famous for her novels, criticism, travel writing--and, at the merely personal level, for her irregular relationship with H. G. Wells. A prolific, protean author, she wrote for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Sunday Telegraph, and The New York Herald Tribune. She also was an important correspondent for The Bookman.

She was born in London. Her Irish journalist father deserted her Scottish mother – and then died – while Cecily was still a child. The rest of the family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was educated at George Watson's Ladies College. She trained as an actress, taking the name "Rebecca West" from Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She became involved in the women's suffrage movement before the First World War, and worked as a journalist on Freewoman and the Clarion. She met Wells in 1913, and their affair lasted ten years. They had a son, Anthony West, but Wells was already married (for the second time). West is also said to have had affairs with Charlie Chaplin and newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook.

In 1930, she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews, and they remained together until his death in 1968. Before and during World War II, West travelled widely, collecting material for books on travel and politics. She was present at the Nuremberg trials. Her later work as a writer and broadcaster reflected these experiences.

She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1949, and was raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1959.

West is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking, Surrey. [1]

Quotes

  • "I myself have never been able to find out 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."
  • "It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion."
  • "Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and their audience."
  • "Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

Fiction

  • The Return of the Soldier (1918)
  • The Judge (1922)
  • Harriet Hume (1929)
  • The Harsh Voice:Four Short Novels (1935)
  • The Thinking Reed (1936)
  • The Fountain Overflows (1957)
  • The Birds Fall Down (1966)
  • This Real Night (1984)
  • Cousin Rosamund (1985)

Non-Fiction

  • Henry James (1916)
  • The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928)
  • St. Augustine (1933)
  • Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a 1,181-page classic of travel literature, giving an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazism, structured about her trip to Yugoslavia in 1937.
  • The Meaning of Treason (1949)
  • The New Meaning of Treason (1964)
  • A Train of Powder (1955)
  • The Court and the Castle: some treatments of a recurring theme (1958)

External links

References

  • Carl E. Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century
  1. ^ Rebecca West. Necropolis Notables. The Brookwood Cemetery Society. Retrieved on 2007-02-23.

This biographical information was gathered from the Rebecca_West page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

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