Abstract
Before refashioning herself as the writer “Rebecca West,” Cicely Fairfield (1892–1983) trained as an actress. She saw at firsthand the art of theatrical costuming—experience that served her well in her role as drama critic in the 1920s and also in her public self-presentation as a woman author. Her understanding of clothes proved even more important to her career as a writer of fiction. In novels such as The Return of the Soldier (1918), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), and Sunflower (published posthumously), West used dress to mark class status, artistic taste, and sociopolitical attitudes, and to indicate inner states of being, as well as to express her own complex literary, aesthetic, and philosophical negotiations between the modernist present and the Victorian past.
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Stetz, M.D. (2020). Fashioning Modern and Modernist Authorship: Rebecca West in the 1920s and 1930s. In: Egan, G. (eds) Fashion and Authorship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_11
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