Style is the man. The adage need not be changed in gender to include Miss West, for she writes with such force as to make most male writers appear effeminate. A rich style therefore demands a well-furnished mind, and this Rebecca West possesses. It would be easy to turn this review [of "The Meaning of Treason"] into grouped quotations to display the vigor of her thought, the shape of her sentences, her knowledge of psychology, her sense of terror and of exile, her humor, the profundity of her ethical judgments, her vignettes of people and her panoramas of places.
Surprisingly, considering the subject, this book contains intimate descriptions of buildings in London, interiors and exteriors, that make it, in my judgment, the best writing on architecture and the looks of cities since Ruskin. This sense of solid reality is a part of the maturity of Miss West's style, which tacitly assumes literary culture, and builds on the creative inventions of Shakespeare and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Henry James and D. H. Lawrence….
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