In-Print Watch

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Many major newspapers and journals this year have published favorable reviews of Survivors in Mexico. One particularly notable article appears in the November 17 issue of The New Republic, by Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, editor of Letras Libres. Krauze compares West's and Lawrence's ideas about Mexico at length, and calls Survivors "one of the most original and intelligent attempts at comprehension" of Mexican history and society. Krauze also commends Schweizer for a "commendable, painstaking, and timely edition." Jack Coughlin's drawing of an elderly West accompanies the article.

The Sentinel, discovered and prepared for publication by Kathryn Laing, has also garnered tremendous interest. Look for reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, and particularly Gillian Glover's article in The Scotsman, January 24, 2003, which ran it as a cover story. Glover quotes West's 1907 letter to The Scotsman, in which she excoriates another letter writer for opposing the NWSPU, and for not realizing "the profound national effects of the subjection of women on the nation." Noting that with this letter West "broke into print for the first time," Glover wryly remarks that "The Scotsman does not receive quite such forceful letters from George Watson pupils today."

Victoria Glendinning's biography Rebecca West: A Life is now available as an audio-book, narrated by Donada Peters. To order, go to http://www.audio-book.ws/books/rebecca-west-life.php. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, also narrated by Donada Peters, is available from the same company.

For a great caricature of West in old age, see the David Levine drawing that accompanies Rosemary Dinnage's article "Staying the Course" in The New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982.

There were several mentions of West in reviews of recent books: Gary Wills' Saint Augustine's Sin (Viking, 2003); Janine di Giovanni's Madness Visible: A Memoir of War (Knopf, 2003); The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970-1980 (Knopf, 2003); and A Personal Biography of William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw," by Mary Kenny (New Island, 2003). Jeremy B. Shea, in an August 20, 2003, St. Louis Post-Disptach article that summarizes recent books about spies, mentions that Allan Furst's The Book of Spies includes West among its "superb writers [with] authentic credentials," and calls West a "legend."

West was quoted in several obituaries for Lord Hartley Shawcross, a Nuremberg prosecutor who died July 10, 2003. She wrote that his final address was "full of living pity, which gave the men in the box their worst hour."

Liz Smith began her gossip column in the June 4, 2003 edition of New York Newsday with a West quote: "The world loves a liar. There is a kind of sanctity about a lie. If a man says of another that he is guilty of meanness, dishonesty, sexual depravity or cruelty, even of murder, it does not matter how worthless the accuser may be, the accusation will joyfully be believed by a large number of people, provided it be false." Smith goes on to say that though West is one of her "literary heroes," she "part[s] company with her here" because [p]eople are not as stupid as Miss West would show them to be."

Natalie Angier's article "Are Women Necessary?" in the November 11, 2003 edition of the New York Times explains recent experiments with stem cells that could allow for all-male reproduction. Near the end, Angier writes, "Given such recent and imminent developments, Rebecca West, journalist, novelist, and companion of H.G. 'Doomsday' Wells, was eerily prescient in her observation that motherhood is 'like being one's own Trojan horse.'"