Dame Rebecca West(1892–1983)

Cicily Isabel Fairfield was born at Streatham in south London on 21 December 1892, the third daughter of Charles Fairfield, an Anglo-Irish Protestant journalist of impressive but financially-failing literary credentials (he had been the *Glasgow Herald*'s special correspondent in the American Civil War, the *Echo*'s Vienna correspondent through the Bismarck negotiations, and the *Standard* leader-writer through the 1880s before his inherited capital ran out), and Isabella Mackenzie, an Edinburgh-born concert-pianist daughter. The household was the chronic professional Anglo-Irish-Edinburgh-Protestant version of the late-Victorian intellectual: well-read, well-connected, and continuously broke. The father abandoned the family in 1901 when she was eight. Her mother moved the three girls to Edinburgh to live near Isabella's family; Cicily was schooled at George Watson's Ladies' College in Edinburgh from 1903 to 1907, won a scholarship to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London at sixteen, failed the audition for the actress's tier of the RADA syllabus, and turned to journalism instead.

She took the pen name *Rebecca West* in 1912 at nineteen from the Ibsen character in *Rosmersholm*, an unmarried Norwegian woman of strong feminist-political principles who runs the household of the Lutheran widower-priest Rosmer and who provoked the play's central political crisis through her uncompromising commitment to the freethinking position. The name change was permanent. She had begun writing book reviews for the suffragette weekly *The Freewoman* under her own name from eighteen, switched to the pen name from her *Freewoman* review of H. G. Wells's novel *Marriage* in September 1912 (she had savaged the novel as a piece of self-justifying patriarchy), and used the pen name across the next seventy-one years of professional writing. Wells read the review, asked the magazine for an introduction, and the two met in person at the Wells house at Sandgate, Kent in November 1912. She was twenty. He was forty-six and was, alongside Bernard Shaw, the most-read English-language writer in the world.

The relationship that followed was the foundational complication of her adult life. The affair ran from 1913 to 1923. She gave birth to their son Anthony West at her mother's house at Hunstanton in Norfolk on 4 August 1914, the day Britain entered the First World War; the boy was raised under an assumed half-orphan identity (told that his mother was his aunt) until he was four and was the subject of a forty-year subsequent emotional dispute between West and Wells's wife Catherine Robbins that ran through her whole adult life. The relationship with Wells ended on her terms in 1923 when she walked out of his Whitehall Court flat after eleven years and went to write for the *New York Herald Tribune*'s European correspondent's desk. She married the merchant banker Henry Maxwell Andrews at the Marylebone Register Office in November 1930. The marriage was the long second domestic register of her adult life and lasted thirty-eight years until Henry's death from a stroke at their Buckinghamshire house in November 1968.

*Black Lamb and Grey Falcon* (1941), the two-volume eleven-hundred-page travel book on the Yugoslavia she had toured in 1936, 1937 and 1938, was the foundation of her literary reputation. The book was written across the eight years between the third Yugoslav journey and the publication date in the United States in October 1941 (six weeks before Pearl Harbor); it ran through Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Dalmatia as a travel-cultural-political-historical narrative on the Habsburg-and-Ottoman heritage of the south-Slav lands, and on the political shape of Yugoslavia as Western Europe stood on the edge of war. The book was the foundational English-language work on the Balkans of the twentieth century. The post-war work was the *New Yorker* reportage from the Nuremberg trials in 1946 (collected as *The Meaning of Treason*, 1947, the foundational English-language journalism on the post-war disposal of Nazi war criminals), the *New Yorker* coverage of the William Joyce treason trial at the Old Bailey in 1945, and the long *Sunday Telegraph* journalism of the next four decades.

She continued working until the year of her death. She published *The New Meaning of Treason* (1964), the updated edition of the Nuremberg book that absorbed the Cold-War Cambridge-Five disclosures of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby defections; the unfinished autobiographical *Sunflower* (which Henry's death and her own subsequent reluctance kept out of print until 1986); and the *Sunday Telegraph* book reviews that ran across her late seventies and eighties. She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1959 on the recommendation of Harold Macmillan, the only one of the major twentieth-century English women writers other than Daphne du Maurier to receive that honour during her life. She died at her London flat at Princes Court, Brompton Road on 15 March 1983, ninety years old. Her relationship with her son Anthony West (who became himself a substantial American-published novelist and the biographer of his father) had broken down in the late 1950s when his biography of Wells took a pro-Wells, anti-mother position; the breach was not repaired. The West name in its English-side catalogue is the directional locative for the western settlement, the most-common single English locative surname behind only *North*; she carried the Rebecca West version of it from a Streatham Anglo-Irish journalist's family into the foundation generation of twentieth-century English political journalism and travel writing.