Rebecca West

From Philosopedia

Rebecca West [DBE] (21 December 1892 - 15 March 1983)

Dame Rebecca West was the pseudonym of Cecely (she later changed it to "Cicily") Isabel Fairfield, a British-Irish feminist and writer famous for her novels and for her relationship with H. G. Wells. A prolific, protean author, she wrote essays and articles 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.

Born in London, she moved with her family to Edinburgh when 10. Her Irish father was a journalist who deserted her Scottish mother, then died while Cecily was still a child . She was educated in Edinburgh at George Watson's Ladies College, where some innocently penned verses caused a scandal. In 1911 she briefly joined the staff of the feminist publication, Freewoman.

She renamed herself after an Ibsen heroine from Rosmersholm. "Rebecca West" became a lead writer for a socialist newspaper, the Clarion.

At age 19, she embarked on a 10-year love affair with H.G. Wells, who was 46 and whom she had previously referred to as "the old maid among novelists." Their son Anthony was born in 1914 but Wells was already married (for the second time).

In 1923, West left Wells. She is said to have had other love affairs, including affairs with Charlie Chaplin and newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook. In 1930, she married banker Henry Maxwell Anderson.

Her noted articles included "A Reed of Steel" about Emmeline Pankhurst. Her first novel was The Return of the Soldier (1918), followed by The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942, about Yugoslavia), The Birds Fall Down (1966), and The Fountain Overflows (1956).

She covered the Nuremberg trials and wrote A Train of Power about the case in 1955. She described the Nazi leaders in a dubious sexual context: Goering was "like a madam in a brothel," and Streicher was "a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks."

In 1959 for her services to literature, she was created a DEB ("Dame).

West continued writing until her death at age 90. She was known for her pithy quotes, such as those cited in her The New York Times obituary:

• 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.

In 1928, she observed in a speech to the Fabian Society in London:

• 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.'

• "I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you," she told Vogue in 1983.

In the 1970s she called Richard Nixon "an example of bad form combined with Original Sin."

About religion, she wrote,

• I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in

disguise. . . . Creeds pretend to explain the total universe in terms comprehensible to the human intellect, and that pretension seems to me bound to be invalid. . . .

• The belief that all higher life is governed by the idea of renunciation poisons our moral life. . . . If we do not live for pleasure we will soon find ourselves living for pain. . . . ”

At the end of her life she was considered England's foremost woman of letters. West died in London.

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