Rebecca West - Cultural References

Cultural References

Virginia Woolf named Rebecca West as the "arrant feminist" who offends men by saying they are snobs in chapter two of A Room of One's Own: "hy was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?"

Bill Moyers's interview "A Visit With Dame Rebecca West," recorded in her London home when she was 89, was aired by PBS in July 1981. In a review of the interview, John O'Connor wrote that "Dame Rebecca emerges as a formidable presence. When she finds something or somebody disagreeable, the adjective suddenly becomes withering."

West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier, was turned into a major motion picture in 1982, directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. More recently, an adaptation of The Return of the Soldier for the stage by Kelly Younger titled Once a Marine took West's theme of shell-shock-induced amnesia and applied it to a soldier returning from the war in Iraq with PTSD.

There have been two plays about Rebecca West produced since 2004. That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, by Carl Rollyson, Helen Macleod, and Anne Bobby, is a one-woman monologue in which an actress playing Rebecca West recounts her life through some of her most famous articles, letters, and books. Tosca's Kiss, a 2006 play by Kenneth Jupp, retells West's experience covering the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker.

Robert D. Kaplan's influential book Balkan Ghosts (1994) is an homage to West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which he calls "this century's greatest travel book"

A 1990s female Canadian rock group headed by Alison Outhit called itself "Rebecca West."

In February 2006, BBC broadcast a radio version of West's novel The Fountain Overflows, dramatized by Robin Brook, in six 55-minute installments.