Numerous biographies have been published about the England-born author, journalist, and critic Cicely Isabel Fairfield (1892-1983), otherwise known as Rebecca West. But Gibb offers a fresh look at a writer who was ahead of her time in the early 20th century. West ("The Return of the Soldier") had many successes but also experienced heartache and struggle. While she lived an accomplished career, had many love affairs, including one with H.G. Wells that produced an illegitimate son, and was wed for over three decades to banker Henry Maxwell Andrews, she also encountered a challenging childhood, a strained relationship with her son, and issues in her marriage. Gibb's passion for her subject is illustrated in the writing's rich detail; readers feel like they're witnessing the described accounts firsthand. Using West's correspondences and personal papers, media interviews, and conversations with the writer's friends and employees, the author captures West's point of view and describes how t

"This collection of her letters has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for woman suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year." "The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West's famous lover H.G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolfe, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations."--Jacket.

Annotation As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writingargues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genreone in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, par