"This collection of her letters has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for woman suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year. The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West's...

"In 1900 Rebecca West was an eight-year-old girl living on the outskirts of London. Of that year, she remembers the aged Queen Victoria--a little bundle of black clothes propped up in an open horse-drawn carriage--and the ragged march down her suburban street that celebrated the relief of Mafeking in the far-off Boer War. This was a time when European empires covered much of the world, when North America was seen as a land of innocence and vast, untainted...