Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches

As this book reminds us, Rebecca West burst onto the literary scene in 1912 as a "firebrand essayist, acerbic book reviewer and radical journalist" (p. 22). Her reputation peaked between the 1940s and 1960s when she was a regular reviewer for major newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic; her reputation had declined by the time of her death in 1988. In terms of her critical reputation, West's misfortune was her longevity and her productiveness. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she long outlived her radical youth, and as a prominent journalist and commentator was faced with the weekly task of responding to the changed world order of the post-war, cold-war world. Her shifting political positions and the multiplicity of genres in which she wrote made her difficult to pin down; she was not easily accommodated into anyone's cause or canon. Nevertheless, in recent years, the renewed interest in women's writing and, in particular, the rethinking of modernism sparked by feminist literary historians and critics has led to a revival of interest in this complex and contradictory writer. Crucial feminist presses, such as Virago, have played an important role in bringing West's work to the attention of a new generation of readers.

Schweizer's collection is offered as both a response and contribution to this revival of scholarly and critical interest in West. Thanks to the efforts of recent scholars (including Ann Norton and Kathryn Laing, who contribute to this book) we now have access to more of West's work than ever before. Her early journalism has been collected and anthologized, and lost manuscripts and alternative versions of chapters have been discovered in manuscript collections at—among other libraries—the University of Tulsa. This book continues the work of displaying and interpreting these newly discovered works and fragments, and it updates West scholarship and criticism by subjecting a fairly wide range of her work to new theoretical and analytical approaches.

Framed by a brief preface on West's politics by her biographer Carl Rollyson and Bonnie Kime Scott's interesting afterword on teaching West today, the collection comprises a lively editor's introduction, giving a useful overview of the current state of West studies, thirteen essays, and a couple of appendices, which reprint and comment on the editorial approach to the "Cordelia Chapter" omitted from West's novel This Real Night. The essays are grouped into four sections: historicist analyses, gender studies, issues in aesthetics and textuality, and philosophical approaches. In the first section, Phyllis Lassner seeks to demonstrate that West's "aggressive concern for European Jewry" (p. 47) links the apparent gap between her socialism and anticommunism; Loretta Stec throws new light on West's liberalism; and Peter Christensen uses documents relating to a Russian spy to show how West transformed history into fiction in The Birds Fall Down. In the second section, Cheryl Wilson examines the performativity of gender in relation to musical performance in The Fountain Overflows; Ann Norton analyzes the hitherto missing chapter of This Real Night to illuminate both the character of Cordelia and the nature of West's reworking of the original for this character (West's oldest sister Lettie); and Francesca Frigerio explores West's depiction of the eponymous heroine of Harriet Hume as an engagement in contemporary debates on the social and cultural status of female musicians. Debra Rae Cohen and Margaret Stetz, in section three, historicize the aesthetic traditions in which West worked by exploring the aesthetic influences of eighteenth-century Scottish architects (the Adam brothers) and Oscar Wilde, respectively, while Kathryn Laing deploys the idea of the palimpsest to trace West's evolving ideas about motherhood and female sexuality as she revises them in a series of texts from The Sentinel to The Judge. In the final section, Nancy Paxton seeks to untangle the complexities of Ellen Melville, the central character of the latter novel, by exploring its intertextual relations with Freud's ideas on mourning and melancholy and Sophocles' Antigone; Nattie Golubov mines West's essays and fiction in order to throw light on her enduring belief in—yet changing conceptualization of—art as a humanizing and quasi-religious force. This section concludes with Schweizer's rather unconvincing attempt to claim West as a proto-postmodernist who simultaneously offered a critique of postmodern relativism through her advocacy of political and moral activism.

This is an interesting collection, which will be essential reading for students of West. However, its microscopic—and slightly myopic—focus on its subject means that it will probably be of less interest to a wider scholarly audience.