An engaging story of a successful writer and unhappy mother
Customer Rating: 
I really enjoyed reading this book, though I must admit, I think that I would not have enjoyed knowing Rebecca West in person!
This book traces West's life in detail, from her chaotic childhood to her death as a respected literary dame of England, including her relationship with the married H.G. Wells which produced a child, Anthony West. It was her relationship with her son that was the primary drama of Rebecca's life, and was the source of most of her unhappiness, though I can't say that she was a victim of this scenario, but rather a perpetrator of it.
West's father left the family when Rebecca and her two older sisters were young, and it seems that this act of her father's colored the rest of her life with paranoia, insecurity and fear. While West built a name for herself as a critic (critics are those about whom writer Anne Lamott quoted the simile that critics are like those who come on the battle field after the battle has been fought and shoot the wounded) and as a fiction and nonfiction writer extraordinnaire, her private life was upsetting, tumultuous and painful for her and those who knew her due to her intensely unhealthy relationship with her son Anthony. (Did her father's dramatic and painful leavetaking create a personality disorder in the young Cicily Fairfield, her real name?)Though she did have a longterm marriage to a man not her son's father, she felt her own recriminations in this area as well due to her husband's longtime illness, his apparent infedelitites and her dissatisfactions with some aspects of their married life overall.
This book does a wonderful job of, I think, objectively portraying both the power and accomplishment of Rebecca West the writer, and the pathetically sad, cloying, manipulative and bitter Rebecca West, the mother. She is someone about whom one might issue the judgment, "She did the best she could. Unfortunately, her best was unacceptable." But only in the area of her motherhood. In her writing life, her best was beyond expectations.
About her writing, this book is also incredibly illustrative. I was particularly interested in the chapters about her work on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, which is one of my favorite books. The level of commitment it took to produce this 1000-plus page book as an amalgam of several trips, using her conversations with her husband as a stand-in for the various arguments about Yugoslavia -- and the world -- that the reader might offer causes the reader of this book to feel sheer and total awe of the labor of which this book was the result . Her other work, her critical articles, her fiction, her books on treason and the Nuremburg trials, were approached in the same complete, exhausting, demanding way. (And the reader deeply wishes her work on Mexico, envisioned by West as being similar to Black Lamb would have been finished.)
Rollyson's book was an incredibly engaging study on the life of a woman whose difficult personality probably made her the effective and insightful critic that she was. Her choice of pen name was probably indicative of who she was, though she perhaps would have been the last to be able to articulate that. Rebecca West was the name of an Ibsen character who was an outcast and was accused of bewitching others...
Rollyson portrays West's excellence as a writer and her failures interpersonally with her son and her grandchildren without bias, and even as the reader can see that West would not have made a good friend, the reader roots for her, hopes for her, and follows her life with high interest and respect. I recommend this book, not only as a portrait of a writer, or of a woman, but of the times in which she lived and how an ambitious woman responded to them, where she succeeded, and where she failed.
