The Life of ‘Rebecca West’

Abstract

This chapter is primarily biographical, a review of elements that have shaped a life and a career. As an introduction to Rebecca West’s writings, it is designed to correct some common misstatements in reference works, — for instance, that Rebecca West was born on Christmas Day. It will show that her late Victorian and Edwardian childhood imbued her with faith in a species of evolutionary meliorism that lasted well beyond the First World War. Her ambivalent attitude towards her father, and her deep love for her mother, affected her readings of Freudian doctrine and in important ways her choice of fictional characters for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, it is evident that not all the evidence is available. Professor Gordon N. Ray’s important study, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), is admittedly a partial portrait, if only because ‘Dame Rebecca’s letters to Wells during the ten years that they were together had been destroyed by him long after their separation’. Much can never be resurrected from the past; much deserves not to be resurrected. She was a determinedly private person, understandably so: only a few close friends were invited to her marriage to Henry Maxwell Andrews, a Scottish investment banker (1930) and she never used him as the basis of a fictional character.