music, books, love and kindness

There's a new biography on author Rebecca West that a review in the Washington Post has inspired me to read. It mentions how good she was at keeping a mask on even as she worried terribly and had deep insecurities as her “worth as a sexual being.” I completely forgot I own two unread books by her, which I dug out out recently and gobbled up quickly.

Lorna Gibb tells us, in this sensible and readable biography of the great Rebecca West, that once at lunch with various luminaries including the Aga Khan, Odette Keun, H.G. Wells’s mistress of the moment, “turned to the Aga Khan, asking him to back up her opinion that the English were prudish in public but ‘lubricious in private.’ ” The remark seems to have embarrassed most (if not all) at the table, but surely truer words have rarely been spoken. If friendships and rivalries are dominant themes of British literary life, sex in all its various manifestations runs them a close second, and rarely more so than in the life of Cicely Isabel Fairfield, born in 1892, who changed her name to Rebecca West in 1911 and proceeded to cut an exceedingly strange swath through the bedrooms of the literati.

For me of this review read here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-extraordinary-life-of-rebecca-west-b-y-lorna-gibb/2014/05/28/5f6c7c3c-df52-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html