Word: rebecca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Woman Writer. When, at the end of World War I, Rebecca West became the book critic of the New Statesman and Nation, she was already a minor celebrity. She wrote with an authority beyond her years or experience in a prose in which, at its best, a logic of music was magnificently mated to a logic of ideas. At its worst, it was excessive and overblown. Sometimes she took time out from her breadwinning chores to write a novel (Harriet Hume). Sometimes she collaborated on satirical sketches (Lions and Lambs, The Rake's Progress) with Cartoonist David...
Flowers & Cows. At 55, Rebecca West is greying and has put on weight which makes her look stocky rather than stout. Vestiges of her girlhood beauty now light a face that is impressive with mature intelligence. But, since she has little interest in dress, she often looks as if somebody had thrown her clothes on her as she rushed for the train...
Unlike most writers' farms, the Andrews project makes a profit. But not enough to support Ibstone House. Since her husband has lost most of his fortune, Rebecca West must still write for a living. The U.S. market pays her top rates for practically anything she cares to write, and she writes at top speed. Her report on Lord Haw Haw's trial, some 6,500 words, was in the New Yorker's office 24 hours after the trial ended, and almost no editing had to be done on it. Says grateful New Yorker Editor Harold Ross...
...Rebecca West rather enjoys it. For with all her warmth of heart and incandescence of mind, she is seldom averse to a good brawl. She listens, calmly poised for pouncing, when she is called a Fascist, a Communist, an anti-Semite, though she is none of those things. The root of the misunderstanding is that in a world racked by partisan passion, which more & more insists on viewing men in black & white, as caricatures of good or evil, she finds them blends of both. Her view asserts the faith that what distinguishes men, not so much from the brutes...
This faith Rebecca West tries to express with a tonality equal to its meaning. Thus, in a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time...