Rebecca West Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Identity
Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield on 21 December 1892 in London, the daughter of Charles Fairfield, a journalist of Irish background, and Isabella Mackenzie, who was Scottish. Her father's irregular fortunes and eventual departure left the family to manage on reduced means, and West spent parts of her girlhood in Scotland as well as England. She trained for the stage as a teenager and, while acting and beginning to write, adopted the pen name Rebecca West from the heroine of Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm. The new name announced a voice that would be independent, analytical, and often combative. Her sister, Dr. Letitia Fairfield, became a pioneering physician and public figure, and the two women's careers unfolded in parallel as examples of professional ambition in an era of limited opportunities for women.

Journalism and Early Novels
West began publishing as a journalist and critic in the 1910s, writing for feminist and radical periodicals such as The Freewoman under editor Harriet Shaw Weaver and later contributing to the New Statesman. Her criticism was fearless, mixing literary appraisal with political argument, and she also advocated women's suffrage. She came to wider attention with The Return of the Soldier (1918), a compact, psychologically acute novel about shell shock and memory at the end of the First World War. It was followed by further fiction in the 1920s, including The Judge (1922) and the experimental Harriet Hume (1929), while she continued to publish reviews and essays that established her as a formidable presence in British letters.

H.G. Wells, Family, and the Personal Sphere
In 1913 West met the novelist H.G. Wells, and their ensuing relationship, intellectually intense and publicly scrutinized, lasted for years. They had a son, Anthony West, in 1914. The personal and professional ramifications of that connection were long lasting: Wells remained an influential figure in her life, while Anthony grew into a writer and critic who later assessed his parents' intertwined legacies. West did not marry Wells; in 1930 she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker whose steadiness contrasted with the turbulence of her earlier life. Andrews became a significant companion during her extensive travels of the 1930s and supported the demanding research that shaped her most ambitious work.

Witness to Europe: Travel and War Reporting
During the 1930s West traveled repeatedly in the Balkans. Those journeys culminated in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a vast blend of reportage, history, and cultural analysis centered on Yugoslavia. The book, written as catastrophe engulfed Europe, examined empires, national myths, and the moral pressures of modernity with a depth unusual for travel writing. Her acute sense of historical fracture carried into the postwar period. She reported on the Nuremberg trials and other proceedings for American and British outlets, including The New Yorker, and drew on this experience in A Train of Powder (1955). Her investigations into betrayal and ideology produced The Meaning of Treason (1947) and its later expansion, which considered British traitors and Cold War espionage. These works combined courtroom narrative with moral philosophy, placing West among the most searching political writers of her generation.

Later Fiction, Criticism, and Honors
West's later novels show her enduring interest in the psychological and the historical. The Fountain Overflows (1956), the first in a semi-autobiographical sequence, portrays a gifted but precarious family and has been cherished for its warmth and clarity of observation. She returned to political conspiracy and the stresses of revolutionary ideology in The Birds Fall Down (1966). Alongside fiction, West's criticism remained prolific, ranging across literature and the arts; she had an abiding interest in how narrative relates to authority, tradition, and conscience. Her stature as a public intellectual was recognized formally when she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959. Throughout these decades she remained in conversation, sometimes congenial, sometimes adversarial, with prominent contemporaries whose works she reviewed and debated, including figures such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence.

Style, Convictions, and Influence
Across six decades, West's sentences carried unmistakable energy, blending metaphor with forensic inquiry. She distrusted both totalitarian schemes and fashionable cynicism, and her writing pursued a moral realism that insisted on the complexity of individuals under pressure. The people closest to her life and work marked this outlook in different ways: the example of her mother, Isabella Mackenzie, who sustained the family; the early abandonment by her father, Charles Fairfield, which sharpened her sense of precariousness; the intellectual contest and intimacy with H.G. Wells; the stabilizing loyalty of Henry Maxwell Andrews; and the continuing dialogue with her son, Anthony West, whose own books participated in the long conversation about responsibility, art, and family that occupied her.

Final Years and Legacy
Rebecca West died on 15 March 1983 in London. By then she had become a touchstone for how a writer might straddle journalism and literature without sacrificing rigor in either. She left behind novels that endure for their psychological insight, essays that reshape debates about treason, justice, and memory, and a model of public engagement animated by independence of mind. Writers and historians continue to turn to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon for its unmatched portrayal of the Balkans on the eve of war, and to her trial reporting for its clarity about law and conscience in the aftermath of catastrophe. Her career, from the audacity of a young critic signing herself after an Ibsen heroine to the authority of a Dame of the British Empire, traces a life devoted to the exacting work of seeing the 20th century clearly and writing it whole.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by Rebecca, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Music - Writing.

• 1966 The Birds Fall Down (Novel)
• 1956 The Fountain Overflows (Novel)
• 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Non-fiction)
• 1926 This Real Night (Novel)
• 1925 The Thinking Reed (Novel)
• 1918 The Return of the Soldier (Novel)