Features January 1991
Rebecca West: the fictions of fact and the facts of fiction
To write about Rebecca West is to deal in larger and larger uncertainties—uncertainties, often enough, that are taken for the currency of fact and truth. Despite the claims of a few critics with special interests, the verdict of literary history has yet to be reached on a sprawling body of work full of unexpected twists and turns—from St. Augustine and Proust to England’s wartime incubus, Lord Haw-Haw; from best-selling fiction to wide-ranging lectures at prestigious universities. Rebecca West was always taking the world, and perhaps even herself, by surprise, venturing into new territory (Yugoslavia, the Nuremberg trials, a South Carolina courtroom), mixing modes and genres—and no doubt “memory and desire” as well. It was an astonishing career for the mere chit of a girl—barely nineteen—whose clever sallies first appeared in the feminist Freewoman and the socialist Clarion in...
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