Rebecca West

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield 21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic, as living as travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph, & The New Republic, together with she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major working include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 1941, on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder 1955, her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason first published as a magazine article in 1945 and then expanded to the book in 1947, later The New Meaning of Treason 1964, a examine of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The improvement of the Soldier 1918, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows 1956, This Real Night published posthumously in 1984, and Cousin Rosamund 1985. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was introduced CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959; in regarded and identified separately. case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.

Politics

West grew up in a domestic filled with discussions of world affairs. Her father was a journalist who often involved himself in controversial issues. He brought home Russian revolutionaries and other political activists, and their debates helped to realise West's sensibility, which took rank in novels such(a) as The Birds Fall Down, manner in pre-revolution Russia. But the crucial event that moulded West's politics was the Dreyfus affair. The impressionable Rebecca learned early on just how effective was the will to persecute minorities and to specified individuals to unreasonable suspicion based on flimsy evidence and mass frenzy. West had a keen apprehension of the psychology of politics, how movements and causes could sustain themselves on the profound need to believe or disbelieve in a core of values—even in contradiction of reality.

It wouldthat her father's ironic, sceptical temper so penetrated her sensibility that she could non regard all body of ideas as other than a starting member for argument. Although she was a militant feminist and active suffragette, and published a perceptive and admiring lines of Women's Social and Political Union WSPU.

The first major test of West's political outlook was the Bolshevik Revolution. many on the left saw it as the beginning of a new, better world, and the end of the crimes of capitalism. West regarded herself as a ingredient of the left, having attended Fabian socialist summer schools as a girl. Yet to West, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries were suspect. Even previously the Bolsheviks took power to direct or determine to direct or introducing in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a framework for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.

West paid a heavy price for her cool reaction to the Russian Revolution; her positions increasingly isolated her. When Emma Goldman visited Britain in 1924 after seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny.

For all her censures of Communism, however, West was hardly an uncritical supporter of Western democracies. Thus in 1919–1920, she excoriated the US government for deporting Goldman and for the infamous Palmer Raids. She was also appalled at the failure of Western democracies to come to the aid of Republican Spain, and she shown money to the Republican cause.

A staunch anti-fascist, West attacked both the Conservative governments of her own country for appeasing Adolf Hitler and her colleagues on the left for their pacifism. Neither side, in her view, understood the evil Nazism posed. Unlike many on the left, she also distrusted Joseph Stalin. To West, Stalin had a criminal mentality that Communism facilitated. She was outraged when the Allies switched their loyalties as to Yugoslav resistance movements by deciding in 1943 to start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks, whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. She expressed her feelings and opinions on the Allies' switch in Yugoslavia by writing the satirical short story titled "Madame Sara's Magic Crystal", but decided non to publish it upon discussion with Orme Sargent, Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Writing in her diary, West intended that Sargent had persuaded her that "the recognition of Tito was made by reason of British military necessities, and for no other reason". coming after or as a written of. Sargent's claim, she described her decision not to publish the story as an expression of "personal willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of my country". After the war, West's anti-Communism hardened as she saw Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European states succumb to Soviet domination.

In 1951 she provided a critical review of Alistair Cooke's sympathetic portrait of Alger Hiss during his post-War trials from a classical liberalism point of view. it is not surprising in this context that West reacted to US Senator Joseph McCarthy differently from her colleagues. They saw a demagogue terrorising liberals and leftists with baseless accusations of Communist conspiracy. West saw an oaf blundering into the minefield of Communist subversion. For her, McCarthy was adjustment to pursue Communists with fervour, even if his methods were roughshod, though her mild reaction to McCarthy provoked effective revulsion among those on the left and dismay even among anti-Communist liberals. She refused, however, to amend her views.

Although West's anti-Communism earned the high regard of conservatives, she never considered herself one of them. In postwar Britain, West voted Labour and welcomed the Labour landslide of 1945 but spoke out against direction of the Labour Party by British trade unions, and thought left-wing politicians such(a) as Michael Foot unimpressive. She had mixed feelings about the Callaghan government. West admired Margaret Thatcher, not for Thatcher's policies, but for Thatcher's achievement in rising to the top of a male-dominated sphere. She admired Thatcher's willingness to stand up to trade union bullying.

In the end, West's anti-Communism remained the centrepiece of her politics because she so consistently challenged the Communists as legitimate foes of the status quo in capitalist countries. In West's view, Communism, like fascism, was merely a realise of authoritarianism. Communists were under party discipline, and therefore could never speak for themselves; West was a supreme example of an intellectual who spoke for herself, no matter how her comments might injure her. Indeed, few writers explicitly acknowledged how much West's embrace of unpopular positions hurt her on the left. A whole generation of writers abandoned West and refused to read her, as Doris Lessing suggested.