Source:Gibb, Lorna. West's World

Summary

This is the story of the life of Rebecca West, English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. Perhaps best remembered for her classic account of pre-war Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, West was a towering figure in the British literary landscape. Lorna Gibb's vivid and insightful biography looks at the woman behind the reputation.

Reviews

Rebecca West is a major figure in 20th-century literature. Her prose is instantly recognisable, with its long, coolly balanced sentences and its precise, startling imagery. And there are places and people that will now always be seen through her eyes: Yugoslavia, on the brink of war; the Nazi high command in the Nuremberg dock. West was a key player in three generations of literary life, and she was loved and hated by many of the most powerful men of her day. According to HG Wells, who took her virginity and fathered her child: "I had never met anything like her before, and I doubt if there was anything like her before." West's story has been told twice already by two masterful biographers. Victoria Glendinning's brief life from 1987 is a portrait of a friend. It makes no claims to be comprehensive, but is consistently insightful, alive to West's emotional contradictions. Carl Rollyson's 1996 life is authoritatively comprehensive. Rollyson is a punchy storyteller and is very good on the autobiographical content of West's novels, though he has a tendency to read her emotional life a little schematically (admittedly, a tendency West herself shared). Unfortunately, Gibb does not seem to have considered which aspects of West's life remain uncharted before writing West's World. Reading Gibb's book, it appears that it falls to her to document West's 90 years month by month. The fact that she attempts to do this in such a slim book means that any discussion of either West's work or her inner life is necessarily more cursory than it is in Rollyson's book, belying West's World's claim to be "the definitive biography". Gibb's account is also marred by an obtrusive style, with most sentences bursting with cliched adjectives. Gibb's account is also marred by an obtrusive style, with most sentences bursting with cliched adjectives. ~Extracts of Lara Feigel's review, 6 Apr 2013

"Just how difficult it is to write a biography," observed Rebecca West in Vogue in 1952, "can be reckoned by anybody who sets down just how many people know the truth of his or her love affairs." In West's case, this instinctive association of biography with romantic secrets is apt. Who was Rebecca West? A feminist pioneer who also believed in marriage? A brilliant journalist who wrote a 20th-century classic? A jill of all trades whose life and loves mirror their century? Despite her publisher's claim of a "definitive biography", Lorna Gibb fails to illuminate these questions. West's World is really what Auden called "a shilling life", the retelling of a career we love to read about, lazily written and sloppily edited. Anthony West did not write HG Wells in Love. The editor of the TLS in 1970 was Arthur Crook, not Cook. For a fuller understanding of this fascinating woman, we're better off returning to another biography, published as recently as 1987, by Victoria Glendinning. Strangely, Lorna Gibb hardly refers to this. I wonder why. ~Extracts of Robert McCrum's review, 7 April 2013

Rebecca West remains an enigma, says Virginia Rounding, reviewing Lorna Gibb's life of the grande dame of letters. In the foreword to her 1987 biography of Rebecca West – novelist, journalist, critic and grande dame of letters, but equally famed as one of the mistresses of H G Wells and mother of his son, Anthony – Victoria Glendinning acknowledged that there was room for further accounts of this multifaceted character. (Hers was published only four years after her subject’s death.) In 1995, Carl Rollyson produced Rebecca West: a Saga of the Century and now it is the turn of Lorna Gibb, whose previous work was a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope. Gibb cannot be faulted for the scope of her research and the amount of material she has unearthed; what she has done with that material is slightly more problematic. West had far sounder judgment in political affairs than in her personal life. Her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, for instance, is still valued for its insights into the former Yugoslavia, and, at a time when many of her contemporaries took one side or the other, she was seduced neither by fascism nor communism. That she was herself aware of the contradictions in her life is evident from her decision to submit herself to Freudian analysis, well before this became a usual thing to do. This episode is completely glossed over by Gibb, who merely tells us that West “travelled to Florence, where she underwent psychotherapy”. It would have been good to have learnt a little more about this, and maybe less about some gratuitous details, such as the “tragic” death of West’s cat. ~Extracts of Virginia Rounding's review, 9 Apr 2013

Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in the minds of critics, and she has no secure literary status.’ It is always dangerous to declare what posterity will think. The best life [story of Rebecca West] is by Victoria Glendinning, who conveys the atmosphere of the time, and the heroic quality of West’s endeavour. Gibb begins by quoting West’s comment on ‘our curious national habit of writing monographs on one subject without looking into its context’. You won’t, however, find much command of context here. No mention of her contemporaries and sometimes friends May Sinclair, Storm Jameson or Rose Macaulay, and little explanation of West’s world. This casual treatment of the context runs on throughout. The problem may be the limits of Gibb’s research. She has gone thoroughly through the published material, and may have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of West’s writings — certainly we rarely hear about her from other observers. Much of the biography is taken up with summaries of West’s letters, diaries or journalism.There is very little about West’s business dealings, and almost nothing about her relations with publishers. There is, however, a lot about cats, including one called Zadok the Priest who is said to meet ‘a precipitous death…hit by a car’. Rebecca was a gregarious woman all her life, but Gibb’s interviews with those who knew her personally are limited to a couple of late secretaries and members of her family. Is there really nobody still around in literary London who remembers a writer who died in 1983? The result is a surprisingly short and superficial life, which unearths very little, if any, new information and has not much to say of any interest about the writing. ~Extracts of Philip Hensher's review, 30 March 2013.

Data Details

• Genre/Form: Biography
• Named Person: Rebecca West
• Material Type: Biography
• Document Type: Book
• All Authors / Contributors: Lorna Gibb
• ISBN: 9780230714625 0230714625
• OCLC Number: 819519358
• Description: 320 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates: illustrations; 24 cm

References

NPR Book Review: The 'Wayward And Defiant' Life Of Journalist Rebecca West by Michael Schaub. 17 May 2014.