Philip Hensher

West’s World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rececca West, by Lorna Gibb — review

<em>Philip Hensher</em> explains how Rebecca West’s remarkably liberated attitude to life cost her dear

issue 30 March 2013

Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in the minds of critics, and she has no secure literary status.’

It is always dangerous to declare what posterity will think, but West does seem to be on the slide. Some of her books are in print. They now seem quite mixed in quality. Of her novels, The Fountain Overflows is probably the best: a late-ish autobiographical novel, with some charming whimsy and some very unexpected turns in direction. (I like the impoverished cousin, plagued with poltergeists in the middle of afternoon tea, and doing her best.)

West was born Cicely Fairfield, a name she quite rightly dismissed as impossible for a serious woman writer, a Mary Pickford name avant la lettre; The Fountain Overflows is her most Cicely-ish novel, and all the better for it.

Written by
Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher is professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of 11 novels including A Small Revolution in Germany.

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