Rebecca West

Cicily Fairfield was born to a musically talented Scottish mother, Isabella, and a journalist, Charles, who had served as a stretcher-bearer during part of the American Civil War. Charles deserted the family when Cicily was a newborn. Isabella moved the family, including Cicily’s two older sisters, to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Cicily grew up in a bookish and intellectual home. As a young woman already advocating for feminist causes in various periodicals, she adopted the pseudonym Rebecca West, taken from the heroine of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm. After West published a provocative review of one of H. G. Wells’s novels, Wells, intrigued, invited West over for lunch, which led to a 10-year love affair. Their relationship produced a son, Anthony West, with whom West had a troubled relationship. West wrote widely, including travel narratives (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), literary criticism, novels (The Return of the Soldier was her fiction debut), and coverage of the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker. By middle age, West had accrued both fame and fortune for her writing, and during World War II, she sheltered Yugoslav war refugees on her southern England estate. Though she considered herself a member of the political left, West was also staunchly anti-Communist in her writings, a position that didn’t endear her to some erstwhile allies. West was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1959. She traveled widely and wrote prolifically well into old age.