West, Dame Rebecca

West, Dame Rebecca, the adopted name of Cecily Isabel Fairfield (1892–1983), trained briefly for the stage in London, then became a feminist and journalist, much influenced at this stage by the Pankhursts (see women's suffrage); from 1911 she wrote for The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Clarion. Many of her shrewd, witty, and combative pieces have been collected and reprinted as The Young Rebecca (1982, ed. Jane Marcus); this includes her outspoken review of H. G. Wells's Marriage (1912), which led to a ten-year love affair and the birth of a son, Anthony West. Her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which describes the return home of a shell-shocked soldier, was followed by The Judge (1922), The Strange Necessity (1928), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1956), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is a two-volume study of the Yugoslav nation. She was present at the Nuremberg trials, and The Meaning of Treason (1949) grew out of articles originally commissioned by the New Yorker. The reputation of her novels tends to have been eclipsed by the panache of her reportage and journalism, but feminist re-assessments in the 1980s have admired her strong and unconventional heroines, and her fine craftsmanship.