Black Lamb

A Week in Literary History

December 21st, 2002

In 1892, English author Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1942) is born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in Streathem.

Rebecca West, b. December 21, 1892, d. 1983

A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which she shows a mastery of description and fluency of style that put her in very select company. Even more rare, she’s a writer’s writer but also a reader’s writer.

Suggested Reading Novels The Judge, 1922. Harriet Hume, 1929. The Thinking Reed, 1936. Critical Studies Henry James, 1916. D.H. Lawrence: An Elegy, 1930. Arnold Bennett Himself, 1931. Other Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1941. The Meaning of Treason, 1947.

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Category: Books and Authors, A Week in Literary History | Link to this Entry