Works by
Rebecca West
(aka Dame Rebecca West)
(Writer)
[1892 - 1983]

Fiction

• The Return of the Soldier (1918)
  A shell-shocked officer returns to the tranquillity of his home and the 3 women who love him — the cousin who narrates his story, the wife he fails to recognize, and the first love of his youth. This 1918 novel takes a perceptive look at the effects of the first modern war on British society.

• The Judge (1922)

• Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929)

• The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels Four Short Novels (1935)

• The Thinking Reed (1936)

• The Fountain Overflows (1957)
  The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father?s genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.
  
  In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.

• The Birds Fall Down (1966)

• This Real Night (1984)

• Cousin Rosamund (1985)

• Henry James (1916)

• The Strange Necessity (1928)
  Essays and reviews

• St. Augustine (1933)

• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
  Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West’s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country’s history as well as its daily life.

• The Meaning of Treason (1949)
  In her classic study of WWII, Dame Rebecca West interprets the impulse of treachery and betrayal. From the trials of William Joyce and John Amery, the renowned historian takes the reader from a London devastated by war into the inner world of "sufferings which overtake people who live unnaturally and cut the bonds which bind them to their own country."

• The New Meaning of Treason (1964)

• A Train of Powder (1955)

• The Court and the Castle Some Treatments of a Recurrent Theme (1958)

See also:

• Rebecca West (1987) by Victoria Glendinning
  Rebecca West, born Cissie Fairfield in Edinburgh in 1892, cut her way to fame first through her long relationship with H. G. Wells, then as an author (Black Lamb and Grey Falcoln, much referenced as the most comprehensive fictional work ever written about the Balkans; The Meaning of Treason, and The Fountain Overflows, a novel based on her childhood). She took her pen name from a line in Ibsen. Rebecca West died in 1983. Friends remember her as a woman of disturbing brilliance, magnetism and complication.

• The Essential Rebecca West: A Celebration (1987) by Samuel Hynes

• Selected Letters of Rebecca West (2000), Bonnie Kime Scott, ed.
  Dame West was a prolific correspondent, in the course of which she set down her frequently scathing assessments of the literary movements, political events and prominent figures of her day. The range of topics addressed in the letters is astounding: literary figures (including Shaw, Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence - as well as lesser known women writers, including Emma Goldman and Dorothy Thompson), historical events (both world wars, America in the Roaring Twenties, cold war espionage and lynching trials) and political movements (Fabian socialism, woman suffrage, communism, fascism and apartheid). West emerges from all of this as an extremely witty and brilliant commentator - but also infuriatingly arrogant, distrustful and, on occasions, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic. As Professor Scott rightly states in her introduction to the volume, "to read [West's] letters in an informed way is to receive an education in the culture of the twentieth century."

• Rebecca West (2002) by Bernard Schweizer
  Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a prominent English critic, journalist, and novelist. She contributed to feminist and socialist magazines, had a lengthy relationship with H. G. Wells, and was named Dame of the British Empire in 1959. Her literary reputation declined after 1970 and was revived in the mid-1980s, with the posthumous publication of three novels and a memoir, as wells as the reissue of several earlier works. With the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon catapulted her into the limelight and brought her wide critical attention. This book offers a much-needed assessment of her literary career. Schweizer's volume analyzes West's spiritual and philosophical ideas, asserting that her novels and travel writings betray an epic impulse and therefore reinvent epic heroism in feminist terms. The first part of this study examines her fiction, including, The Judge and the trilogy of novels about the Aubrey family. Philosophical and conceptual elements in her fictional and nonfictional prose are explored, relating her ideas to other thinkers. The volume closes with a look at West's reworking of epic conventions in her travel writings, including her unfinished Survivors in Mexico.

• Rebecca West and the God That Failed (2005) by Carl Rollyson
  After completing his biography of Rebecca West in 1995, Carl Rollyson felt bereft. As his wife said, “Rebecca was such good company.” He had already embarked on another biography, but Rebecca kept beckoning him. He felt there was more to say about her politics—a misunderstood part of her repertoire as reporter and novelist. And had he done justice to her enormous sense of fun and humor? He regretted excising the portrait of her he wanted to put at the beginning of his biography. His editor kept cutting away at what he called Rollyson’s doorstop of a book. And then after years of waiting, Rollyson received her FBI file. He kept running into Rebecca, so to speak, when he was working on his biographies of Martha Gellhorn and Jill Craigie. Interviews in London often turned up people who had known West as well.
  
  Thus piece by piece, Rollyson accumulated what is now another book about Rebecca West. This new collection tells the story of how his biography got written, of what it means to think like a biographer, and why West’s vision remains relevant. She is one of the great personalities and writers of the modern age, and one that we are just beginning to comprehend.