The Novels

Abstract

Two conventional and normally useful ways of approaching a writer’s creative record — in Rebecca West’s case, six novels and four novelettes, published between 1918 and 1966 — are of little use here. For one thing, we are not dealing with a novelist seeking in book after book to define a style, a distinctive idiom, until finally she knows how best to formulate her insights in a language best suited for the purposes of advancing a narrative. The Return of the Soldier, serialised in the Century in February and March 1918, may claim too easily the ripeness of an age that Rebecca West had not yet acquired, but from the beginning the verbal performance is remarkably mature:

Indeed grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like the siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one’s company, thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes. …¹