The current interest in Rebecca West's work, even if it is partly due to the pursuit of every and any feminist writer and partly homage to her age, is well deserved. But she is a critic's nightmare. How can anyone have written so well and so badly? Have worked in so many different genres? Be so resistant to fitting any particular pigeonhole? If [The Return of the Soldier, Harriet Hume, The Young Rebecca, and 1900] were representative of her life's work, she need not be taken too seriously; but in fact they are oddments from the very beginning and very end of her long writing career. One could say that they are interesting mainly because of their relation to the other books—except that it is so hard to relate the different parts of her work to each other.
She writes, she once said in a radio talk, to explore character: an unexceptionable explanation from a writer half of whose oeuvre has been fiction, except that it is only outside her novels that she really does so. When she has to invent, she generally flusters and fails; but once she has a theme, whether a journey or a political trial or a critical exposition, her gift for observing character and then fitting it into great sweeping generalizations and moral patterns comes into its own. She needs her characters to be somewhat at a distance: a fourth-century saint (Augustine), the peasants and monks and chambermaids and children of her Balkan journey, the human dregs in the dock at Nuremberg. Watching these like a hawk, interpreting them sub specie aeternitas, she is stunningly magisterial. "Who does she think she is?" we are inclined to ask as she explicates history, sorts out morality, defines our condition and destiny. Someone exceptionally well up to the job or doing so, is the answer.
This is a free excerpt of 306 words. There are 1,760 words (approx.
6 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our West, Rebecca 1892–1983: Critical Essay by Rosemary Dinnage Access Pass.
