Wyndham Lewis Portraits

Dame Cicily Isabel Andrews (née Fairfield 1892–1983), who changed her name to Rebecca West, once had theatrical aspirations and took the name from the heroine of Rosmersholm, a play by Ibsen. West had a ten year affair with the writer H. G. Wells and went on to become a successful feminist journalist, writing for British and American newspapers. She was also a novelist and literary critic.

In 1914, Lewis included ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, a short story by West, in the first issue of Blast, the Vorticist magazine. West wrote a favourable review of Lewis’s first novel, Tarr, and subsequently he flattered her as “a critic who has never sold her pen, as others have, and who therefore today still occupies the position that she always has, as one of the two or three people who remain above the commercial mêlée into which writing has been led.”