As an adult, Rebecca West eventually recognized her father's talent--his achievements as a scholar much interested in Herbert Spencer and as a writer--and the good influence of his keen mind and conversation on her life. She had, however, a much stronger identification with her mother and grieved over the waste of her musical talent and intelligence. When Cicily Fairfield was ten, her father, who had abandoned the family, died alone in a boardinghouse in Liverpool. Isabella Fairfield took Cicily, her fourteen-year-old sister, Winifred, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Letitia, from London, where they had been living, to her relatives in Edinburgh.
West's autobiographical novel, The Fountain Overflows (1956), a study of the ways in which genius is nurtured or destroyed, provides considerable insight into West's early life. Like her narrator, Rose, she was the third daughter in a family that lived in somewhat genteel poverty on the outskirts of London at the turn of the century, and, like Rose again, she was closest of the three daughters in sympathy with the mother. In the novel, as in life, all three daughters admire their father's handsome appearance and brilliant conversation, but they also see his failings--irresponsibility in keeping jobs, reckless gambling in the stock market, and capricious abandonment of the family for many months at a time.
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