Rebecca West
born Dec. 21, 1892, London, Eng.
died March 15, 1983, London
British journalist, novelist, and critic,
who was perhaps best known for her reports
on the Nürnberg trials of war criminals
(1945–46).
West was the daughter of an army officer and
was educated in Edinburgh after her father’s
death in 1902. She later trained in London
as an actress (taking her pseudonym from a
role that she had played in Henrik Ibsen’s
play Rosmersholm).
From 1911 West became involved in
journalism, contributing frequently to the
left-wing press and making a name for
herself as a fighter for woman suffrage. In
1916 she published a critical biography of
Henry James that revealed something of her
lively intellectual curiosity, and she then
embarked on a career as a novelist with an
outstanding—and Jamesian—novel, The Return
of the Soldier (1918). Describing the return
of a shell-shocked soldier from World War I,
the novel subtly explores questions of
gender and class, identity and memory. Her
other novels include The Judge (1922),
Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed
(1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and
The Birds Fall Down (1966). In 1937 West
visited Yugoslavia and later wrote Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, 2 vol. (1942), an
examination of Balkan politics, culture, and
history. In 1946 she reported on the trial
for treason of William Joyce (“Lord
Haw-Haw”) for The New Yorker magazine.
Published as The Meaning of Treason (1949;
rev. ed., 1965), it examined not only the
traitor’s role in modern society but also
that of the intellectual and of the
scientist. Later she published a similar
collection, The New Meaning of Treason
(1964). Her brilliant reports on the
Nürnberg trials were collected in A Train of
Powder (1955). West was created a Dame
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
in 1959. During West’s lifetime, her novels
attracted much less attention than did her
social and cultural writings, but, at the
end of the 20th century, feminist critics
argued persuasively that her fiction was
formally as inventive as that of her female
modernist contemporaries.
Rebecca West: A Celebration, a selection
of her works, was published in 1977, and her
personal reflection on the turn of the 20th
century, 1900, was published in 1982.
Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by
Bonnie Kime Scott, was published in 2000.
The critic and author Anthony West was the
son of Dame Rebecca and the English novelist
H.G. Wells.
