To write about Rebecca West is to deal in larger and larger uncertainties—uncertain ties, often enough, that are taken for the cur rency of fact and truth. Despite the claims of a few critics with special interests, the verdict of literary history has yet to be reached on a sprawling body of work full of unexpected twists and turns—from St. Augustine and Proust to England’s wartime incubus, Lord Haw-Haw; from best-selling fiction to wide-ranging lectures at prestigious universities. Rebecca West was always taking the world, and perhaps even herself, by surprise, venturing into new territory (Yugoslavia, the Nuremberg trials, a South Carolina court room), mixing modes and genres—and no doubt “memory and desire” as well. It was an astonishing career for the mere chit of a girl—barely nineteen—whose clever sallies first appeared in the feminist Freewoman and the socialist Clarion in 1911 and 1912, who be came the darling of Harold Ross’s New Yorker and the scourge of Communist sym pathizers in the Forties and Fifties, and who died a Dame Commander of the British Em pire in 1983. But if the general outlines raise eyebrows, the biographical record is a tangle of conflict and contradiction, much of it produced by Rebecca West herself. She “lived her life operatically,” as Victoria Glendinning has put it, “tinker[ing] endlessly with the story-line, the score, and the libretto. [And] the plot remains”—in a mild manner of speaking—“unresolved.”[1]

The Wests who concern us, however, in fact and fiction, in life and