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The operation of necessity: Intellectual affiliation and social thought in Rebecca West's nonfiction Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Harris, Kathryn M. Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 06:00:19 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282888 THE OPERATION OF NECESSITY: INTELLECTUAL AFFILIATION AND SOCIAL THOUGHT IN REBECCA WEST'S NONFICTION by Kathryn Harris Copyright © Kathryn Harris 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate College 2005 UMI Number: 3177527 Copyright 2005 by Harris, Kathryn All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3177527 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Kathryn Harris entitled THE OPERATION OF NECESSITY: INTELLECTUAL AFFILIATION AND SOCIAL THOUGHT IN REBECCA WEST'S NONFICTION and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degreeypf Doctor of Philosophy. William Epstei^ Date Roger Bowen Date Suresh Raval ^ Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Disserofeon Director: William Epstein late 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript on whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Prof. Bill Epstein, the chairman of my doctoral committee, whose efforts in my behalf during the writing of this dissertation have been extraordinary. It is not pleasant or easy to supervise a dissertation via telephone, e-mail, and U.S. mail for a non-resident graduate student. His expertise has made this study immeasurably better than it might otherwise have been. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 6 INTRODUCTION 8 CHAPTER 1 PERSONAL HISTORY AND PUBLIC LIFE 18 CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP 129 CHAPTER 3 MENTORS, ALLEGIANCES, AND INTELLECTUAL AFFILIATIONS 160 CHAPTER 4 EARLY LITERARY CRITICISM 200 Henry James. "Uncle Bennett," D. H. Lawrence, and The Strange Necessity CHAPTER 5 BIOGRAPHY AND ALLEGORY OF HISTORY 244 St. Augustine and A Letter to a Grandfather CHAPTER 6 POLITICAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY 269 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon CHAPTER 7 POLITICAL JOURNALISM 313 The Meaning of Treason. The New Meaning of Treason. A Train of Powder, and The Vassall Affair CHAPTER 8 LATER LITERARY CRITICISM 358 The Court and the Castle WORKS CONSULTED 390 6 ABSTRACT Major scholars of the literary production of Rebecca West (1892-1983), English journalist, critic, biographer, historian, and novelist, universally cite the generic range of her writing as the primary impediment to a unified critical view of her work. For seventy-one years, from 1911 to 1982, her career as journalist, political analyst, theater critic, and literary reviewer was the stable matrix from which emerged her fiction, literary criticism, biography, and history. A growing body of scholarship is working toward the construction of a unified view of West's vast body of work, which includes eight books of fiction, twelve books of nonfiction, numerous lectures printed as monographs, perhaps one thousand newspaper articles and review-essays, and more than 10,000 letters. By far the greater portion of her work is her nonfiction prose, yet extended critiques of her nonfiction are surprisingly few. The present study considers the contexts to which West's major works of nonfiction respond, their central propositions, their formal organization, the metaphors and images that characterize her accounts of ideas incarnate in the experience of individuals, classes, and nations, the critical reception of these works at the time of their publication, and, where possible, more recent critical views. Comprehensive survey of West's nonfiction uncovers not a single unifying theme but rather a circuit of secular ideas indebted to the scientific-rational social thought of Herbert Spencer, which was enormously persuasive among the educated classes of late Victorian and Edwardian England. According to Spencer, who is credited with having constructed the materialist body of thought known as Social Darwinism, the slow working of evolution finds a 7 parallel in the evolution of social organization in human society. This broad view of the social organism, which was an article of faith with West's intellectual predecessors and mentors—^her father, Charles Fairfield; her sister, Letitia Fairfield; her lover and colleague H. G. Wells—confirmed in West a hardy empiricism, a consciously scientific perspective on history, an uncompromising and lifelong feminism, and a progressive politics which inform her examination of complex social and political relationships among individuals, classes, and nations and which are everywhere evident in her literary criticism, political analysis, biography, and cultural history. 8 INTRODUCTION In A Physician Looks at Literature (1923), physician and critic Joseph Collins announced that "for the first time in history women prose writers preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which has been so quickly and successfully purged of anti- feminism" (151). The first ten years of Rebecca West's career in writing, he reported, had convinced "many amateur and professional critics [that she was] the most promising young writer to enter the field of literature in the reign of King George" (169). A quarter century later, in its cover story (December 8, 1947) on West, Time magazine called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" and "one of the greatest living journalists" (108, 116). In 1953, comparing West's accomplishment in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon to the "obstreperous beauty" of a symphony and a concerto by Sir William Walton, Kenneth Tynan called her "the best journalist alive, the only one who can record both the facts and their flavour without loss of grace or vigour, and almost the only one who is ennobled, not disgraced, when reprinted" (95). Over a seventy-year career, her editorial essays, review essays, novels, and social and political histories earned her a wide readership, international acclaim, and a handsome living. However, her work has suffered noticeable neglect in the critical literature, and until the mid-1990s, criticism of her literary production was scattered in reviews, introductions to her work, and biographies of her contemporaries. Now, over eighty years after Collins pronounced her the most promising young writer of her time, a growing body of scholarship considers her literary repertoire, and her literary and intellectual achievement has earned her new popular audiences as well. 9 In fall, 2003, Bernard Schweizer founded the International Rebecca West Society; the keynote address at the Society's first general meeting, which was held at the Mercantile Library in Manhattan, was delivered by Jane Marcus, feminist scholar and editor of The Young Rebecca (1982). On the program of the initial meeting was the first performance of Carl Rollyson's play, Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century. The first issue (Fall 2003) of the online newsletter of the Society, West Words, presents a reminiscence by Norman Macleod, West's nephew and literary executor, of the day in August 1939 when he was sent, in expectation of the aerial bombing of London, to the safety of his aunt's home in rural Sussex—just at the time she was finishing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which armounced the imminence of the coming European war. Also in Fall, 2003, the manhattantheatreresource brought to the stage That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, a one-woman show in which actress Anne Bobby speaks as West. The text of the play was assembled from excerpts from West's essays and books by Bobby herself, by Helen Macleod, West's great niece, and by Rollyson, president of the Rebecca West Society and author of the foundational intellectual and critical biography (1995) of West. The script dramatizes imagined encounters with the personae of West's sister Lettie, her lover H. G. Wells, and her son, Anthony and scenes from her early career as socialist feminist writer during the campaign for women's suffrage; its central sequence is a recitation, with musical accompaniment, of the famous passage from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on the slaughter of the black lamb of the book's title (Wright "That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers").