Rebecca West: A Celebration

by Rebecca West

Rebecca A Celebration

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer. She was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended George Watson's Ladies College.

A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.

Reviews

[Caryatid · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of those authors where if a few words are sufficient a thousand is better, so they think.

[Maureen]

Nice compilation with some good stuff that's hard to find in other places (biography of St. Augustine, excerpt from coverage of Nuremberg trials), some stuff that's better on its own, and some stuff that is just random literary criticism that I'm not too interested in.