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.
With books hard to come by, RG
read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
207
Literary responses
F. Tennyson Jesse
FTJ
later described it as a very bad book. The only excuse I had was that . . . I had to make a living, and Secret Bread, the other book, would take me...
Literary responses
E. B. C. Jones
Mansfield
further praised its distinction of style. Rebecca West
found in it a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching. Her slightly acerbic account of characters and their milieu—the tone of...
Literary responses
Ford Madox Ford
While some critics found The Good Soldierlong-winded, unpleasant, and lacking in focus,
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
34
Rebecca West
gave it an excellent review.
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, 2005.
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...
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/.
Reaction to this book was fiercely negative among traditional Burnsites, especially in Scotland. CC
received threats to her well-being, including one letter signed Holy Willy (after a character satirised by Burns) and containing a...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
VH
's associate Rebecca West
had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
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...
Literary responses
Catherine Carswell
Reviews were mixed. Rebecca West
, reviewing the book before the libel charges, felt that CC
overdid her loyalty to Lawrence.
Pilditch, Jan. Catherine Carswell. A Biography. John Donald, 2007.
142
Virginia Woolf
, having at first thought the book interesting, changed her mind...
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, 2009.
356
It was well-received—as an economical, witty, and ironic exploration of a significant ethical subject—by...
Literary responses
Pamela Frankau
PF
's new agent had accomplished the whole process of selling this book before he had time to read it. He then reminded her that she had her forebears (grandmother and father) to beat; that...
Literary responses
Mollie Panter-Downes
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...
Literary responses
Rose Allatini
Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of...
