There was a time, not so long ago, when signing with a male pseudonym seemed an imperative for any writer. He did not consider it that way a Cecily Elizabeth Fairfield that I end up signing as Rebecca west en the height of sarcasm in the face of such stagnant prejudice among readers and publishers, like a vicious circle with no signs of a solution even in its days.
Of course, Cecily (or Rebecca) was not the only one who, even in the 20th century, needed to complain about the inconsideration for daring to be a writer. In fact, you could say that even she had it a little easier.
Because the issue had already been vindicated throughout the nineteenth century with the Brontë sisters, with Charlotte at the head, or with Aurore dupin. Perhaps a less marked literary machismo in Spain even into the twentieth century, where authors such as Rosalia de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán or Clara Campoamor they did not need the 'nominal cloak', although they certainly shared the maddening stigma of the feminine as minor.
The point is that Rebecca lavished herself on that necessary feminism, also preached from the narrative with brilliant literature in charge of the necessary revisionism. Critical notes between intimacy and customs. A perfectly balanced whole with overflowing creativity towards an overwhelming novelistic construction.
Rebecca West's Top 3 Recommended Novels
The Aubrey family
The lives of the Aubreys have always been clouded by the instability and eccentricity of a father who still writes articles feverishly in his office for hours selling what little furniture they had left to support some crazy cause doomed to failure. But his new job outside London promises, at least for a time, relief from scandal and the threat of ruin.
The mother, a former pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but the truth is that she is as much or more eccentric than her husband. At least that's how Rose, one of the family's three daughters, sees her through her child's eyes, sometimes loving, sometimes cruel. Both she and her twin sister, Mary, are prodigies at the piano. The family is completed by Cordelia, the older sister - tragically deprived of musical talent - and Richard Quin, the youngest of the house.
In The Aubrey Family Rebecca West transformed her own volatile childhood into an enduring art. This is an unadorned but affectionate portrait of an extraordinary family, in which the author used remarkable style and powerful intelligence to analyze the elusive limits of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the hidden.
the soldier's return
Jenny has long yearned for the return of her cousin, Chris Baldry, from the trenches of World War I. The one who returns is, however, a man undergoing a total transformation: he has amnesia, he does not remember the last fifteen years and he is obsessively in love with a woman who is not his wife Kitty, whom he does not even recognize. His attempts to make sense of the life he once had will have unforeseen consequences for those who love him.
Heartbreakingly poignant, The Soldier's Return exemplified for the first time at the time the dramatic psychological effects of conflict on both soldiers and their families, while painting a tense and gripping portrait of the sacrifice, repentance and brutality of warfare. war, capable of irremediably altering our understanding of ourselves.
The interrupted night
With the departure of Piers, a dreamy and irresponsible husband, and the sale of some valuable paintings, Clare Aubrey seems to finally take over the reins of her family. Rose and Mary continue to train as pianists, while Cordelia is forced to work as an art dealer's assistant and give up her artistic aspirations forever, and Richard Quin, the younger brother, contemplates studying at Oxford.
The interrupted night continues the trilogy of the unforgettable Aubrey family at the dawn of the XNUMXth century, when the coming of age of girls, with their gradual acceptance of love and loss, becomes even more moving as the events that will lead to the World War I and its dramatic consequences.
Deserving of unanimous praise generation after generation, Rebecca West is “one of the giants of English literature. No one in this century has used more dazzling prose, had more spirit, or observed the deviousness of human character and aspects of the world more intelligently. ' The New Yorker.
Other recommended books by Rebecca West…
Indissoluble Marriage
Beyond the Aubrey trilogy, Rebecca West also offers great glimpses of that introspection from the familiar turned narrative plot. And already in his time he openly looked at the most bitter sensations of the familiar.
Because beyond the naïve visions about coexistence and growing old hand in hand, there is also the bitterness of all the deadlines that expire and that can be sources of fires of unpredictable dimensions. As in the past, love could be in its contractual form for an eternity, almost always with its leonine conditions against women.
"Until death do us part" appears as one more clause of eternal love, only updated over time towards the icy and insane interpretation of a sinister Poe about to discover the tell-tale heart.
With a syncopated and detailed prose, of exceptional coldness, Indisoluble Marriage takes us into the labyrinths of a tortuous couple relationship in which the liberation of the woman becomes a stormy assassination attempt by a male character perfectly outlined by the prose by West.
