Dame Rebecca West(1892–1983)

Cicily Isabel Fairfield was born at Streatham in south London on 21 December 1892, the third daughter of an Anglo-Irish journalist and an Edinburgh-born concert pianist. She was schooled at George Watson's Ladies' College in Edinburgh, studied acting briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and turned to journalism instead.

She took the pen name Rebecca West in 1912, at nineteen, from the strong-principled feminist heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, and used it across the next seventy-one years of professional writing. She had begun reviewing for the suffragette weekly The Freewoman at eighteen, and her sharp critical voice quickly made her one of the most discussed young political journalists in London.

She married the banker Henry Maxwell Andrews in 1930, the long settled domestic register of her adult life, which lasted thirty-eight years. Through the 1930s she made three journeys through Yugoslavia, and out of them wrote Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), the eleven-hundred-page travel-cultural-political narrative of the south-Slav lands on the edge of war that became the foundational English-language work on the Balkans of the twentieth century.

The post-war work was the reportage that made her one of the foundational figures of twentieth-century English political journalism: the New Yorker coverage of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, collected as The Meaning of Treason (1947), the foundational English-language journalism on the disposal of Nazi war criminals, and the William Joyce treason trial at the Old Bailey. She updated the treason book in 1964 to absorb the Cold-War Cambridge defections.

She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1959 and continued working until the year of her death, the Sunday Telegraph reviews running across her eighties. She died at her London flat on 15 March 1983, ninety years old. The West name, the directional locative for the western settlement and one of the most common English locative surnames, she carried in its Rebecca West form from a Streatham journalist's family into the foundation generation of twentieth-century English political journalism and travel writing.