Rebecca West

Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.

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Famous quotes by rebecca west:

    ... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one’s mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
    Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)