Rebecca West
| Dame Rebecca West | |
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Portrait of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde
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| Born | Cicely Isabel Fairfield 21 December 1892 Kerry, Ireland, United Kingdom (modern-day Ireland) |
| Died | 15 March 1983 (aged 90) London, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Children | Anthony West (1914–1987) |
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West 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 the trial of the British Fascist William Joyce and others; 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 each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic".
Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield in 1892 in Kerry and grew up in a home full of intellectual stimulation, political debate, lively company, books and music. Her mother, Isabella, a Scotswoman, was an accomplished pianist but did not pursue a musical career after her marriage to Charles Fairfield. Charles, an Anglo-Irish journalist of considerable reputation but financial incompetence, deserted his family when Cicely was eight years old. He never rejoined them and died impoverished and alone in a boarding house in Liverpool in 1906, when Cicely was 14. The rest of the family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Cicely was educated at George Watson's Ladies College. She had to leave school in 1907 due to a bout of tuberculosis. Cicely did not have any formal schooling after the age of 16, due to lack of funds.
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