Rebecca West

30:2, Reviews Hardy's interest in the past, whether the pre-historic archaeological past or the mythical past, is the focus of two essays. In "Hardy and the Developing Science of Archaeology," Harold Orel establishes the personal relationship between Hardy and General Pitt-Rivers, one of the first professional archaeologists in England. Through this relationship Hardy's interest was stimulated not only in England's Roman past but in the "barrow building world of several millenia back." Orel shows how this preoccupation permeates Hardy's writings and inspires "some of his finest speculations on the relationship between human beings and the Immanent Will." Hardy's relationship to the past is the subject also of Peter Widdowson's "Hardy, 'Wessex,' and the Making of a National Culture." In a masterful piece of deconstruction, Widdowson challenges the legitimacy of the claim that Hardy is "the supreme poet of the English landscape." The premise of his argument is that where there are critics there is always a "politics of culture" at work, that "all cultural production is always political." The Hardy of the landscape cliché was "reproduced" by English culture because English culture just before World War I "required" a Hardy "to help create a cohesive national consciousness in a period deeply riven by domestic and international forces. . . ." In the practice of his "critiography," Widdowson debunks the image of Hardy the homely pastoralist and "reproduces" in its place a writer who was intensely aware of class division, of the lack of an organic rural culture and of appalling rural poverty. In its four years of publication the Thomas Hardy Annual has featured some of the finest writing on Hardy to be found in the scholarly literature. Like its predecessors, the fourth number is sanely provocative, holding the traditional and more "radical" in exciting tension. The inclusion of two regular features by Richard H. Taylor—"A Survey of Recent Hardy Studes," and the annual "Hardy Bibliography"—helps to make the Thomas Hardy Annual one of the most important single scholarly tools for Hardy scholars today. Lloyd Siemens University of Winnipeg REBECCA WEST Harold Orel. TAe Literary Achievement of Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. $27.50 As is well known, Rebecca West found her nom de plume in Ibsen. The heroine of Rosmersholm is just such a strong-willed, independent-minded young woman as the still teenaged Cicely Isabel Fairfield no doubt wished to be taken for in 1912. She might have made a theatrical career for herself, had she better pleased her 229 30:2, Reviews instructors at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and had she not been fired from a production for reading Creative Evolution during a rehearsal. Instead, West became a journalist, reviewing Gorky's TAe Lower Depths, then producing an article on Mrs. Humphry Ward for the Freewoman, a publication which her mother had forbidden her to bring into the house. Soon after came a review of Wells's Marriage; she wrote for the Clarion and the New Statesman (and for the first issue of the New Republic in the United States); she impressed Edwardian literary circles with her outspokenness and her beauty; she met Ford and Pound and Wells. Thus was launched a career which by 1983 had produced seven novels; nine or so volumes of literary criticism, topical journalism, biography, or political philosophy; two collaborations with the caricaturist David Low; countless uncollected book reviews; a moving pamphlet elegy for D. H. Lawrence; a potboiler (TAe War Nurse: The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front); and the twentieth-century masterpiece of travel literature Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. As if to deny the accidental, improvised way in which West began writing—the regular theater critic of the Evening Standard had no interest in Gorky and passed the assignment on to her—this lifetime's accumulation of work refuses to believe in accident and celebrates whenever it can the virtues of a strong decisive will. Soon after meeting Wells, West was overwhelmed by his personality and swept into a decade-long love affair with him. One of the strengths of Harold Orel's new study of West...