Rebecca West's career as a writer of both fiction and of nonfiction spanned more than seventy years. She excelled in writing novels and short stories, literary theory and criticism, biography, political analysis, and persuasive rhetoric for various causes (socialist, feminist, antifascist, and anticommunist). Both her fiction and nonfiction are notable for their penetrating psychological analyses of motivation and behavior, and her nonfiction demonstrates her ability to research and to synthesize her findings on historical eras and sociological issues.

The parents of Cicily Isabel Fairfield, as Rebecca West was christened, came from families of some distinction. Her father, Charles Fairfield, had been an officer in the Rifle Brigade and was the son of a major in the Coldstream Guards. Her mother, Isabella MacKenzie Fairfield, a pianist, was the daughter of the regular conductor at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh, whose early death limited the income of his wife and...