Dame Rebecca West, DBE (1892 – 1983) was an author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific author in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She met H.G. Wells in 1913, after her provocatively damning review of his novel Marriage prompted him to invite her to lunch. They fell in love, though Wells was married at the time, and their affair lasted ten years producing a son.
In 1947 Time magazine called West, ‘indisputably the world’s number one woman writer’ and in 1954 Kenneth Tynan described her as, ‘the best journalist alive’. She was made CBE in 1949, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to British letters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiction
The Return of the Soldier (1918)
The Judge (1922)
Harriet Hume (1929)
The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels (1935)
The Thinking Reed (1936)
The Fountain Overflows (1956)
This Real Night (1984)
Cousin Rosamund (1985)
The Birds Fall Down (1966)
Sunflower (1986)
The Sentinel (2002)
Non-fiction
The Essential Rebecca West (2010)
Henry James (1916)
The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928)
Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931)
St Augustine (1933)
The Modern Rake’s Progress (co-authored with David Low, 1934)
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
The Meaning of Treason (1949)
The New Meaning of Treason (1964)
A Train of Powder (1955)
The Court and the Castle (1958)
The Young Rebecca (1982)
Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey (1987)
The Selected Letters of Rebecca West (2000), edited by Bonnie Kime Scott
Survivors in Mexico (2003)
Woman as Artist and Thinker (2005)
