Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works 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, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
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Famous quotes by rebecca west:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other’s nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)