The current interest in Rebecca West's work, even if it is partly due to the pursuit of every and any feminist writer and partly homage to her age, is well deserved. But she is a critic's nightmare. How can anyone have written so well and so badly? Have worked in so many different genres? Be so resistant to fitting any particular pigeonhole? If [The Return of the Soldier, Harriet Hume, The Young Rebecca, and 1900] were representative of her life's work, she need not be taken too seriously; but in fact they are oddments from the very beginning and very end of her long writing career. One could say that they are interesting mainly because of their relation to the other books—except that it is so hard to relate the different parts of her work to each other.

She writes, she once said in a radio talk, to...