West, Rebecca (1892-1983). British novelist, journalist, and critic. Born in Kerry, Ireland, to a Scotch mother and Anglo-Irish father, Cicely Isabel Fairfield trained in London as an actress, where she took the name Rebecca West from the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmerhsholm (1886). As a journalist writing for the Freewoman and the Clarion West promoted women’s suffrage and socialist causes and argued against British imperialism. She also became a powerful literary critic, writing reviews for both British and American periodicals. and an important modernist fiction writer. Her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), explored the effect of the trauma of World War I from the perspective of the sister of a combat veteran. Her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is considered a masterpiece of British travel writing. In her later life, West abandoned her early radicalism and was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1959. Cather had met West by early 1927, and later that year West positively reviewed Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for the New York Herald Tribune Books. Cather continued to cultivate West as a critic, ensuring that she got copies of her books, leading to West’s positive review of Shadows on the Rock (1931).