Black and White and Crimson and Purple and Wild

Rebecca West: A Life by Victoria Glendinning. New York: Knopf, 1987. 300 pages. $19.95.

In one of his admirable ghost stories, M. R. James presents a minor character as a type “very prolific” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—an intelligent, aggressive man with a pointed beard and a flannel shirt, a domineering, opinionated semi-Bohemian given to conversation “rather in the nature of a monologue.” Roger Fry noted, too, how many English men and women of the late Victorian period were “not afraid of their own personalities” and openly admitted to being “intense.” Into this age Rebecca West was born in 1892, and throughout her very long life (she died at ninety in 1983) she held to its faith in fearlessly expressed, intense character. As a young woman, she dressed with theatrical panache, made what one contemporary described as “incredibly hair-raising and wicked observations” about art and politics, borrowed a nom de plume from the outspoken heroine of an Ibsen play, and at age twenty became the lover of H. G. Wells, then the best known novelist in England. Wells alone seemed to match her in vitality: he “talked straight on from 1.15 till 6.30,” she reported admiringly in a letter.