Miss West, or Dame Rebecca as she is now styled, may still have an Ibsen conscience, but her world has flowered well beyond introspection, and [Rebecca West: A Celebration] has collected much of it. Some will say too much, for it is made up of many subjects and cannot easily be read through. It celebrates the milestones of her long career, journalistic, novelistic, and biographical, and includes large chunks of her most famous work, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon….

The publishers, looking back now from a different age, tend to present her work as centered on two themes, feminism and the modern fatality of war. Certainly, the fact of Dame Rebecca's womanhood informs her point of view constantly, but her feminism is of the old-fashioned, more practical kind—that of a woman who has succeeded in clearing the requisite space around her in society and has proved that...