Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
Conservative Rebel
By Hilary Mantel
Selected Letters of Rebecca West
edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Bonnie Kime Scott
Yale University Press, 497 pp., $35.00
'Telling the truth is really a very difficult job indeed,' wrote Rebecca West. If, as she did, you live into your ninetieth year, your truth-telling is an enterprise likely to leave a trail of wounded in its wake. Born into the nineteenth century, she focused on the urgent concerns of the twentieth: murder and mass murder, treason and trahison des clercs. Her prodigious output included eleven witty novels, which offer a graceful and nuanced exploration of the emerging consciousness of twentieth-century women, and a short life of Saint Augustine, published in 1933.
Review, 4678 words
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