The current interest in Rebecca West's work, even if it is partly due to the pursuit of every and any feminist writer and partly homage to her age, is well deserved. But she is a critic's nightmare. How can anyone have written so well and so badly? Have worked in so many different genres? Be so resistant to fitting any particular pigeonhole? If [The Return of the Soldier, Harriet Hume, The Young Rebecca, and 1900] were representative of her life's work, she need not be taken too seriously; but in fact they are oddments from the very beginning and very end of her long writing career. One could say that they are interesting mainly because of their relation to the other books—except that it is so hard to relate the different parts of her work to each other.

She writes, she once said in a radio talk, to explore character: an unexceptionable explanation from a writer half of whose oeuvre has been fiction, except that it is only outside her novels that she really does so. When she has to invent, she generally flusters and fails; but once she has a theme, whether a journey or a political trial or a critical exposition, her gift for observing character and then fitting it into great sweeping generalizations and moral patterns comes into its own. She needs her characters to be somewhat at a distance: a fourth-century saint (Augustine), the peasants and monks and chambermaids and children of her Balkan journey, the human dregs in the dock at Nuremberg. Watching these like a hawk, interpreting them sub specie aeternitas, she is stunningly magisterial. "Who does she think she is?" we are inclined to ask as she explicates history, sorts out morality, defines our condition and destiny. Someone exceptionally well up to the job or doing so, is the answer.

But then there are tremendous failures. Here we have reissues of two early novels, from 1918 and 1929. In her early book reviews reprinted in The Young Rebecca she is hilariously cruel about what has displeased her, so let me borrow some of her cheek (if not her wit) and say that they are awful. It is their very awfulness that is endearing: we see that his powerful writer is not in fact the Archbishop of Canterbury and Regius Professor of History and Lord Chief Justice rolled into one, but an uneven writer who spans extremes of brilliance and disaster….

[The Return of the Soldier] is a curious amalgam of some of West's themes: the necessity for truth at all costs; the ineffectuality of men as compared to women; the awfulness, however, of a certain kind of woman. But there is another element in her view of the sexes—and this is going to make modern readers squirm, for I assume the following to be serious:

… it was my dear Chris and my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, [and] I knew it was the most significant as it was the loveliest attitude in the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do.

True. But it has been better put (Shakespeare, John Donne, Ella Wheeler Wilcox …).

Harriet Hume is even more of an oddity, given that it was written eleven years later, when West was in her mid-thirties and had meantime published a successful volume of essays and reviews, The Strange Necessity. Victoria Glendinning in her introduction to the novel charitably calls it "an exercise in the higher whimsy." If the higher whimsy is what you want, it is your book; if not, it is simply embarrassing. West is nothing if not solid and vigorous and prosy, and this arch fantasy about two manikins (or manikin and womanikin) dances like an elephant. Dialogue such as, "You are riding softly down the moments as a snowflake rides down the airs, white, oh, so white, and weightless as anything in this ponderous universe, and you are trembling, trembling, trembling," is neither serious nor a skit; simply skittish. (p. 12)

Harriet, who mews and twitters and scampers about on teeny birdlike feet, embodies things it would seem well worth rejecting; Condorex as masculinity, however, is simply a shit. They pursue each other through baroque landscapes and through the years, and the moral seems to be that the two principles must complement each other.

In fact, though, the female once again has the whip hand, for not only has Harriet the psychic gift of reading Condorex's thoughts instantly—reasonable enough grounds for his eventual murder of her, one would imagine—but she is the one who enlightens him about what the two of them represent…. In spite of [a] kindly pat on the head the Masculine Principle remains understandably gloomy, and the closing wish for the two ghosts—"A Very Happy Eternity"—seems unlikely to come true.

And this is the author who dismissed The Waves as pre-Raphaelite flummery! It is the crudeness of the revenge fantasy—superior women putting down inferior men—that stifles imaginative vitality in these novels. In The Thinking Reed of 1936, a much better book, this has been overcome…. But perhaps it is a handicap, in writing about the relationship between men and women, to be conclusive. To be aghast and muddled and fascinated is at least a good start.

Rebecca West's long and unsatisfactory liaison with H. G. Wells has been well known at least since it was made the subject of a book in 1974. Writers' personal lives, perhaps, shouldn't be raked over while they are still alive; but since West the feminist has much to say about men and women, one cannot pretend that her life story is irrelevant. The experience clearly hampered and damaged her, but perhaps also enriched her writing by making her so well aware of the irrationality of passion and the inadequacy of brisk solutions. (pp. 12-13)

Perhaps this early love affair was an influence on the guiding theme that runs through all West's mature work: that man is crucially divided between affirmative and self-destructive passions. When she pursued the married and rather notorious Wells via two suicide attempts she was a brilliant twenty-year-old at the start of a successful career; what could have been more self-obstructing? But the strength of her best work is this very recognition of our partition between Eros and Thanatos; in this, without benefit of jargon, she is one of the few true Freudians. (p. 13)

[Black Lamb and Grey Falcon] is a marvelous work that outshines everything else she has written: poetic, declamatory, shrewd, funny, immensely ambitious…. In the Balkans, with their extremes of cruelty and heroism, poverty and beauty, she finds a metaphor for this struggle between light and darkness; though the book returns continually to the tragic and abominable, it is suffused with a kind of glow of sensuous appreciation for everything beautiful—especially human beings…. Rebecca West celebrates woman as the first sex, the strong sex, and this is a constant throughout her work. But where the early novels are clogged with daydream and anger, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon radiates good humor. Her husband (she made a happy late marriage) is made an important character in the book, teased, admired, and given sagacious speeches (while a German woman who accompanied them is an embodiment of the anti-life principle). Simply, everyone is in a fix: men are insecure creatures with the double burden of physical strength and dependence on women; women are committed to maternity, but vulnerable to men's revengefulness and unreliability.

In The Young Rebecca we have the first of the three versions of her feminism, a version genuinely innocent of pain and complexity, the early writings of a prodigiously talented and high-spirited girl just out of her teens. These pieces have the humor and glow of her later work without its dark side…. Her easiest targets are the antifeminists of the time; they go down like ninepins…. And (since this was before the time of trying to grapple with the strong-tender-fingers problem herself) she has a remorseless way with the sentimental novelist: "I was held from the very first page, whereon I read: 'There were reservoirs of love in her—of wife-love and of mother-love—accumulating reservoirs, which had never been tapped'…. The conception of fate as a Metropolitan Water Board regulating the flow of spiritual liquids is immense."

But she is as sharp as a knife, too, over women and the things they get away with…. For the middle-class lady "loafing about the house with only a flabby mind for company" she has no mercy. Nor has she for the creed of "virtue" and self-sacrifice. (pp. 13-14)

For the working woman she fights like a tiger, feminism never distracted her from economic injustice. [A vintage essay] from The Clarion, 1913, [shows] her at the top of her form. In "The Sheltered Sex: 'Lotus-Eating' on Seven-and-Six a Week" she casts an eye on a politician's pronouncement that something must be done about women drawing too much welfare benefit. In a blazing rage she compares statements about the sanctity of motherhood with the wages that women in "the graceful feminine occupation of chain-making" are getting for an eighty-hour week….

A writing career of seventy-one years is a rare phenomenon; 1911 seems immeasurably distant even to those of us who are middle-aged. What consistency is there between the young journalist and the eighty-nine-year-old author of the text of 1900 (a better-than-average picture book based on that year) and the author of the books and articles in between? Certainly the twenty-year-old who wrote loftily that "the only way to medicine the ravages of this fever of life is to treat sex lightly,… to think no more hardly of two lovers who part soon than we do of spring for leaving the earth at the coming of June" differs from the writer who struggled ambivalently but more realistically with the relation between men and women. The red-hot socialist of 1913 is not the same as the grave indicter of communism and its spies….

But in 1900 … the young writer is still clearly visible. The wit is as sharp as ever …, and the hauteur …, and the wry view of the sex war …, and the empathy for the working woman…. And what could be more remarkable than that? (p. 14)