Source:West, Rebecca. Selected Letters of Rebecca West

Summary

This collection of her letters has been culled from the estimated ten thousand Rebecca West wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for woman suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year.

The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West's famous lover H.G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolfe, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations.