Rebecca West: a Worthy Legacy

Given Rebecca West's fame during her lifetime, the amount of significant and successful writing she created, and the importance and relevance of the topics she took up, remarkably little has been done to examine her intellectual legacy. Writing in most genres, West has created a body of work that illuminates, to a large degree, the social, artistic, moral, and political evolution of the twentieth century. West, believing in the unity of human experience, explored such topics as Saint Augustine, Yugoslavian history, treason in World War II, and apartheid in South Africa with the purpose of finding what specific actions or events meant in the light of the whole of human experience. The two major archival sources for Rebecca West materials are located at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Special Collections, and at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Many of her works have been recently reprinted and those not easily available are found in the British Library or in the archival depositories noted above. Interviews with persons who knew West were also an important source of information. This dissertation explores chronologically West's numerous works of nonfiction, and uses her fiction where it is appropriate to place into context social, historical, or biographical topics. The manner in which she took up the topics of feminism, art, religion, nationalism, war, history, treason, spying, and apartheid demonstrate the wide-ranging mind of an intellectual historian and social critic. Though her eclecticism makes her a difficult subject, the diversity of her mind and her talent in expressing her thoughts, allow her work to symbolize and illuminate twentieth century intellectual history. Known for her elegant fiction, and forceful personal style, West should also be known as a thinker and social critic. What is common to her eclectic opera is that she forcefully propounded ideas, shook loose staid preconceptions, and recommended new ways of perceiving politics, religion, art, culture, law, and morality