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Dame Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Andrews (née Fairfield))

7 of 29 portraits of Dame Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Andrews (née Fairfield))

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Dame Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Andrews (née Fairfield))

by Howard Coster
half-plate film negative, 1934
Transferred from Central Office of Information, 1974
Photographs Collection
NPG x23917

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Howard Coster (1885-1959), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 9349 portraits, Sitter in 5 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • 100 Pioneering Women, p. 98 Read entry

    Dame Rebecca West (pseudonym of Cicily Isabel Andrews, 1892-1983) was a journalist, novelist, travel writer and critic, her name a byword for independent women. She had published pieces in the feminist journal

    Freewoman during her teenage years, and in its first edition wrote in support of free-love, saying of marriage ‘a more disgraceful bargain was never struck’. Her earliest writing on women’s suffrage was published in the Scotsman in 1904, and she also contributed to the socialist Clarion. Playwright George Bernard Shaw described her writing as brilliant and savage. Among her eight novels is The Judge (1922), a feminist work that tackles patriarchy and rape, unmarried motherhood and suffrage. Sunflower (1986) was based on her affairs with the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook and the writer H.G. Wells (with whom she had an illegitimate child – socially ruinous at the time). Her writing on the Nuremberg trials, The Meaning of Treason (1949), and Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), set her at the forefront of political commentary. That inspiring frontline stance was one she held all her life.

  • Pepper, Terence; Strong, Arthur, Howard Coster's Celebrity Portraits, 1985 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 28 June - 8 September 1985), p. 21

Linked displays and exhibitionsback to top

Events of 1934back to top

Current affairs

Sir Stafford Cripps represents the miners of Gresford Colliery in Wrexham at an inquiry into the recent gas explosion and fire which killed 263 miners, and three rescue workers in one of the worst mining disasters in British history.

Art and science

Percy Shaw invents 'Cat's eyes'. The development of road reflectors increased safety on the roads at night and proved to be particularly useful during the wartime blackout. They are still used today.
Dylan Thomas published his first volume of poetry, 18 Poems.

International

Stalin and Hitler consolidate dictatorial power by 'purging' their opponents. In the Soviet Union, members of the Communist Party and particular sectors of society such as the intelligentsia were targeted in the 'Great Purge', while in Germany Hitler murdered hundreds of potential opponents in the SA during the 'Night of the Long Knives'.
Thousands in the USA are forced to flee their homes to escape the Dust Bowl storms.

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