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Rebecca West (1) (1892–1983)

Författare till Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia

För andra författare vid namn Rebecca West, se särskiljningssidan.

47+ verk 7,765 medlemmar 190 recensioner 30 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Taking her name from one of Henrik Ibsen's strong-minded women, Rebecca West was a politically and socially active feminist all her long life. She had an intense 10-year affair with H.G. Wells, with whom she had a son. A brilliant and versatile novelist, critic, essayist, and political commentator, visa mer West's greatest literary achievement is perhaps her travel diary, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1942). Five years in the writing, it is the story of an Easter trip that she and her husband, British banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (whom she had married in 1930), made through Yugoslavia in 1937. A historical narrative with excellent reporting, it is essentially an analysis of Western culture. During World War II, she superintended British broadcast talks to Yugoslavia. Her remarkable reports of the treason trials of Lord Haw and John Amery appeared first in the New Yorker and are included with other stories about traitors in The Meaning of Treason (1947), which was expanded to deal with traitors and defectors since World War II as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The Birds Fall Down (1966), which was a bestseller, is the story of a young Englishwoman caught in the grip of Russian terrorists. From a true story told to her more than half a century ago by the sister of Ford Madox Ford (who had heard it from her Russian husband), West "created a rich and instructive spy thriller, which contains an immense amount of brilliantly distributed information about the ideologies of the time, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the conflicts of customs, belief, and temperament between Russians and Western Europeans, the techniques of espionage and counter-espionage, and the life of exiles in Paris" (New Yorker). Unlike that of her more famous contemporaries, her fiction is stylistically and structurally conventional, but it effectively details the evolution of daily life amid the backdrop of such historical disasters as the world wars. Her critical works include Arnold Bennett Himself, Henry James (1916), Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, and The Court and the Castle (1957), a study of political and religious ideas in imaginative literature. In 1949, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
Foto taget av: Rebecca West, 1912

Serier

Verk av Rebecca West

The Return of the Soldier (1918) 1,547 exemplar
The Fountain Overflows (1956) 1,054 exemplar
The Birds Fall Down (1966) 530 exemplar
Harriet Hume (1929) 285 exemplar
The Thinking Reed (1936) 271 exemplar
Denna sanna natt : [roman] (1984) 254 exemplar
The Judge (1922) 252 exemplar
Kusin Rosamund : [roman] (1985) 252 exemplar
The Meaning of Treason (1947) 225 exemplar
The New Meaning of Treason (1964) 222 exemplar
A Train of Powder (1955) 158 exemplar
The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels (1935) — Författare — 130 exemplar
Sunflower (1986) 120 exemplar
1900 (1982) — Författare — 92 exemplar
Survivors in Mexico (2003) 90 exemplar
Family Memories (1648) 80 exemplar
Rebecca West: A Celebration (1977) 67 exemplar
Virago Omnibus II (1728) — Bidragsgivare — 38 exemplar
St. Augustine (1933) 28 exemplar
Henry James (1974) 17 exemplar
The Only Poet (1992) 15 exemplar
The Return of the Soldier [1982 film] — Original book — 8 exemplar
The Modern Rake's Progress (1934) 7 exemplar
Ending in Earnest (1967) 5 exemplar
Woman as Artist and Thinker (2005) 3 exemplar
The Vassall Affair (1963) 2 exemplar
Parthenope (2006) 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

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The 40s: The Story of a Decade (2014) — Bidragsgivare — 275 exemplar
The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1997) — Bidragsgivare — 214 exemplar
Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers (1993) — Bidragsgivare — 191 exemplar
The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage (2003) — Bidragsgivare — 172 exemplar
Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg (1777) — Redaktör, vissa utgåvor157 exemplar
The Norton Book of Personal Essays (1997) — Bidragsgivare — 142 exemplar
Mina två år i Ryssland (1924) — Inledning, vissa utgåvor125 exemplar
The Penguin Book of Women's Humour (1996) — Bidragsgivare — 117 exemplar
On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (1989) — Bidragsgivare — 113 exemplar
Saints for Now (1952) — Bidragsgivare — 103 exemplar
The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker (2021) — Bidragsgivare — 90 exemplar
Nuremberg (1978) — Förord, vissa utgåvor76 exemplar
Great Spy Stories From Fiction (1969) — Bidragsgivare, vissa utgåvor75 exemplar
The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990) — Bidragsgivare — 64 exemplar
Infinite Riches (1993) — Bidragsgivare — 54 exemplar
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Bidragsgivare — 12 exemplar
Witches' Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (1984) — Bidragsgivare — 10 exemplar
The London Omnibus (1932) — Bidragsgivare — 7 exemplar
British and American Essays, 1905-1956 (1959) — Bidragsgivare — 7 exemplar
Agenda : Wyndham Lewis special issue — Bidragsgivare — 6 exemplar

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Vedertaget namn
West, Rebecca
Namn enligt folkbokföringen
Fairfield, Cicely Isabel
Andra namn
West, Rebecca
Födelsedag
1892-12-21
Avled
1983-03-15
Begravningsplats
Brookwood Cemetery, Woking, Surrey, England
Kön
female
Nationalitet
UK
Födelseort
London, England, UK
Dödsort
London, England, UK
Bostadsorter
London, England, UK
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Ibston, Buckinghamshire, England, UK
Utbildning
George Watson's Ladies College
Academy of Dramatic Art
Yrken
writer
author
novelist
Time and Tide (director)
Relationer
West, Anthony (son)
Wells, H. G. (lover)
Fairfield, Letitia (sister)
West, Henry Maxwell (husband)
Organisationer
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary ∙ Literature ∙ 1972)
Time and Tide
Priser och utmärkelser
Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature
Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1949)
Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander, 1959)
Women's Press Club Award for Journalism (1948)
Legion d'Honneur
Benson Medal (1966)
Kort biografi
Rebecca West was the pen name of Cicily Isabel Andrews, née Fairfield, born in London, England (some sources say Kerry, Ireland), to an Anglo-Irish-Scottish family. She was educated in Edinburgh, Scotland but had to leave school at 16. She went to London to train as an actress, and took her pseudonym from her role in the Henrik Ibsen play Rosmersholm. She became a journalist around 1911, working first for the feminist publications Freewoman and the Clarion, in support of women's right to vote, and later contributing essays and reviews to The New Republic, The New York Herald Tribune, The Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and many other national newspapers and magazines in the UK and USA. She was at times a foreign correspondent, and wrote social and cultural criticism, book reviews, travel writing, fiction, and nonfiction. In 1918, she published her first novel, The Return of the Soldier. Other works included The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). After visiting Yugoslavia and the Balkans in 1937, she published the two-volume Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942). Her reports on the Nuremberg trials following World War II were collected in A Train of Powder (1955). West was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959. She had a 10-year liaison with H.G. Wells that began in 1913 and produced a son, Anthony West. At age 37, in 1930, she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker.

Medlemmar

Diskussioner

February Read: Rebecca West i Virago Modern Classics (mars 2017)
Group Read, March 2016: Harriet Hume i 1001 Books to read before you die (mars 2016)
Rebecca West recommendations i Virago Modern Classics (juni 2013)

Recensioner

‘Cordero negro y halcón gris’, de Rebecca West: un libro que ninguna persona culta debe ignorar, Babelia 13.02.2024: https://elpais.com/babelia/2024-02-13/cordero-negro-y-halcon-gris-de-rebecca-wes...
 
Flaggad
Albertos | 22 andra recensioner | Feb 18, 2024 |
"I suppose that the subject of our tragedy written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul, and in me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhappy like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body."

This is a war novel, but we are never at the front, and the focus is not on the soldier, Chris, but on the three women in his life--his wife Kitty, his cousin and childhood companion Jenny (who is also the narrator), and his first love Margaret. When the novel opens Kitty and Jenny are at Chris's estate, and he is away at the front, when they receive a visit from Margaret, a dowdy, lower-class woman who informs them that Chris has been wounded.

At first Kitty and Jenny refuse to believe Margaret, this drudge they have never heard of--why wasn't Kitty as Chris's wife informed of this by the war office? But it turns out to be true. Chris is shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia--he does not remember his wife Kitty or that they had a child who died. What he does remember is Margaret, his first love, who is now the dowdy woman who visited Kitty and Jenny.

Chris is returned to his estate to recuperate and to recover his memories. Despite various attempts to convince him that he is married to Kitty, he is happy only in the company of Margaret. Though she looks old, worn, and poor, she has an inner peace about her, and Chris sees, not her worn physical appearance but the inner glow that comes through. Kitty never warms to Margaret and wants only to bring Chris back to the present, even though "curing" him will mean sending him back to the front. Jenny wavers between letting Chris live happily in the past with Margaret or bringing him back to the present reality.

Although this is a war novel, we see and experience little of the war; instead we see the devastating effects of the war, what it does to one's senses, both to a soldier and to civilians. There is also a lot in this short novel about the struggle between the classes. It was very much grating on me to read how disdainfully Jenny and especially Kitty spoke about Margaret: "They hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day...." The book was somewhat different from what I was expecting, but I'm glad I read it.

3 stars
… (mer)
3 rösta
Flaggad
arubabookwoman | 77 andra recensioner | Jan 29, 2024 |
The wages of war pay far and long. The story is so heartbreakingly tragic, but beautifully told. Sentences run long and sometimes seem to lose the thread, but there are many rewards to be found in West's clever, poetic, evocative delivery. This book deserves its place on the 102 greatest books by female authors, which I'm slowly but surely working through.
 
Flaggad
mlevel | 77 andra recensioner | Jan 22, 2024 |
A soldier, shell-shocked in the trenches of WWI, has lost all memory of the previous fifteen years, leaving him with idyllic memories of young love with an innkeeper's daughter. His arrogant upper-crust wife is a complete stranger, and a cousin (who relates the story) he remembers only as a child. A potential cure means he faces the memory of all the horrors of the front. Is this a real cure or is he better off sick? Even the doctor sees no urgency for change.

The opening chapter filled with upper class horror of anything below them almost put me off reading this book. A woman is noticed approaching the house and Kitty (the soldier's wife) is horrified - ugh, she is badly dressed, ugly, not one of us, don't open the door… That attitude prevails. While the wife is painted as saintly, the other woman, her clothing, her umbrella, is cruelly disparaged.

West's descriptions of nature are lengthy and beautiful, but of necessity character development is minimal as she focuses in on the small group. It is unfortunate that the author used outrageous class prejudice to highlight the tragedy, evidently unable to to recognize that it would be just as devastating in any circumstances. The result is overly romantic but as the author was aged 24 when she wrote this, her first novel, in 1918, maybe it is understandable.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
VivienneR | 77 andra recensioner | Apr 15, 2023 |

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Hugh Whitemore Screenwriter
Mark Boxer Editorial director
Sarah Komar Designer
Ann Wilson Captions
Ian Holm Actor
David Low Illustrator
Nicholas Bentley Illustrator
Victoria Glendinning Introduction, Afterword, Foreword
Sadie Jones Introduction, Afterword
Geoff Dyer Introduction
Samuel Hynes Introduction
Laura Vidal Translator
Nadia May Narrator
Amanda Craig Introduction
Jane Marcus Introduction
Romek Marber Cover designer
Polly Devlin Introduction

Statistik

Verk
47
Även av
29
Medlemmar
7,765
Popularitet
#3,140
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
190
ISBN
335
Språk
10
Favoritmärkt
30

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