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 serious...

The Fountain Overflows is Miss Rebecca West's first novel for twenty-one years and is indeed only her sixth work of fiction. That this should be so is no doubt the price she has had to pay for her versatility as a writer. Are we to think of her primarily as a brilliant reporter, a great journalist? That she certainly is. But during her career as a writer she has played many parts: she has been, among other things, an admirable literary critic and a wonderfully astringent reviewer. Yet the publication...

The Strange Necessity is almost as tedious as Das Kapital, and with much less justification. It is so intrinsically unreadable that the printer's reader will surely be the last and only man who will ever be able to claim that he has read all through the sixty or seventy thousand words of it. In the first place, in so far as it contains any fresh or useful idea on the problem of aesthetics—and we are not sure that it does—the adequate expression of that idea need certainly not have occup...

Rebecca West's new novel ["The Judge"] is a brilliant piece of work, forceful, impressive, haunting with a sense of instance…. Her one previous novel, her critical work, and her essays have shown her to possess a keenly probing intellect, a rich mental background and a notable gift for the art of writing. All this, in fuller, richer development and in finer quality, is evident in "The Judge," but through its pages there shines, too, the clear, unmistakable light of ...

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed," wrote Pascal in the passage from which the title of Rebecca West's new novel ["The Thinking Reed"] is taken. The phrase is curiously suggestive of Miss West's own work. "Thinking," none could deny who watched the flashing wit in her essays of feminism many years ago; nor in the subsequent volumes of her literary essays, at all too widely spaced intervals. But a reed also i...

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 ...

[The] four "short novels" which Miss Rebecca West has collected under the title of The Harsh Voice are a significant expression of current truths, though she may not be the first to make their significance real. Some of the current truths upon which she has most firmly seized are these: that in love and marriage today the intermingling of love and hate has taken on a new complexity, partly on account of changes in manners and the variable economic conditions, particularly in America; [and] tha...

[Fifteen] years after "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," Miss West publishes a new novel ["The Fountain Overflows"], a real Dickensian Christmas pudding of a book. In fact, it is very like Dickens. It is as full of characters—odd and even, but mostly odd—as a pudding of plums; full of incident, full of family delights, full of parties and partings, strange bits of London, the Iobby of the House of Commons, a classic murder with portraits of the murderer, the murderee and...

["St. Augustine"] stands out above its predecessors both in beauty of style and significance of thought. A popular biography only in being easy and delightful to read, Miss West's flexible and trenchant style here wholly at her command, mingling wit and eloquence without disharmony, her book is also a keen analysis of the character and meaning of one of the world's greatest men. Here with a subject worthy of her steel, Miss West has risen above her lesser self, somewhat too gener...

Turning her agile talent to a rather difficult medium Rebecca West has produced four miniature novels, or long short stories, which are chiefly remarkable for their technical brilliance. They have a smooth high glaze, a competence of construction, reminiscent of Somerset Maugham at his slickest and most suave. Only a very good craftsman could have written "The Harsh Voice," but its brittleness and its occasional meretriciousness seem to prove that something besides craftsmanship is required. M...

The Court and the Castle is a series of critical observations about various literary works held loosely together by a concern with how great writers from Shakespeare to Kafka have treated the problem of salvation. Miss West begins with the interesting theory that the king in Shakespeare's plays is fated to misuse the power he possesses, yet the usurper who stands ready to unseat him is invariably evil. Noting that this paradox of power does not seem relevant to actual political life, Miss West confes...

As a novelist, Rebecca West resembles Cordelia, one of the characters in her own book, The Fountain Overflows, a hopelessly unmusical girl in a musical family, whose unflagging industry at violin practice produces not one note that satisfies her talented sisters and mother. Miss West inflicts on the reader the same painful sensation that the Aubrey family felt when poor Cordelia sawed away so indefatigably: why can't she realize she has no gift for this sort of thing? The intention is clear enough. M...

What kind of book about Henry James would you expect from a vivid and eager young radical, whose own interest in politics and history is prodigious, who has a keen appetite for almost every kind of life except the life lived in English country houses, and who detests, with all her many gifts of detestation, the predominance of sex in the relations of men and women? You would do well not to expect a delineative book, which defines Henry James with a portrait-painter's hand, or a luminously expository ...