338
PARTISAN REVIEW
A Savage Pen
SELECTED LETTERS
OF
REBECCA WEST. Edited, annotated, and introduced
by Bonnie Kime Scott. Yale University Press.
$35.00.
PITY THE TARGET of Rebecca West's wit. She rarely missed throughout a
career that spanned nearly the whole of the twentieth century. Especially
in her younger years, when she was writing for such feminist and social–
ist publications as
The Freewoman
and
The Clarion,
her aim was
admirably exact and her venom impressive. The early fame she won for
her all-out attack mode led George Bernard Shaw, no slouch in the
invective department, to say of her when she was not yet twenty-five,
"Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever
I
could and much more
savagely. "
That verbal skill is everywhere apparent in the
Selected Letters of
Rebecca West,
a hefty collection from Yale University Press that, though
running to nearly five hundred pages, is said to barely scratch the sur–
face of her epistolary output. The letters that editor Bonnie Kime Scott,
a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has chosen touch
on all of West's major preoccupations-literature, feminism, history,
espionage, crime, politics-and they offer a representative sense of
West's wide-ranging and restless intelligence as well as her wit.
An example of West's natural comic style, which could be gentle as
well as scathing, appears early in the book as she writes to Dora Mars–
den, the editor of
The Freewoman,
and Grace Jardine, one of the mag–
azine's staff members.
I
hope you're better. The letter which
I
read to the Discussion Cir–
cle sounded as though you felt the calm was doing you good.
I
must
have read your letter with deep expression for subsequently Miss
Macdonald rose from her seat and congratulated me on my lovely
voice, and kissed me. There is an epidemic of kissing in the Free–
woman Discussion Circle. Since you left London
I
have been kissed
by
Miss Macdonald
Stella Brown,
Barbara Low,
Helena Kingscote Greenlaw,
Miss Gallichan
and
A lady in deep mourning with an interest in Eugenics who gives
