Description
Two young women come of age in a novel "unbelievably rich in character, incident, and observation." -- The Boston Globe
Their childhood and adolescence were overshadowed by the Great War. Now, in its lonely aftermath, Rose and Mary Aubrey find themselves deprived of the guiding strength of their cousin Rosamund when she marries a man of dubious morals and intolerable vulgarity. Retreating to an inn on the Thames, they find a haven of security with old friends.
Into this fragile Eden a new, disruptive force is introduced; Rose discovers the power of love, and, confronting her own sexuality, learns to delight in it. With extraordinary fierceness and candor, Rebecca West has written a portrait of sexual awakening, one that allows her characters an uncanny glimpse of our own age.
"Comes as close as we are ever likely to get to a self-portrait of the extraordinary woman who created her." -- Sunday Observer (London)
"The author’s searching, stinging, imaginative intelligence encompasses art and love and justice and simple humanness." -- Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer. She was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended George Watson's Ladies College.A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books forThe Times, theNew York Herald Tribune, theSunday Telegraph, and theNew Republic, and she was a correspondent forThe Bookman. Her major works includeBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon(1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia;A Train of Powder(1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally inThe New Yorker;The Meaning of Treason, laterThe New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors;The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels,The Fountain Overflows,This Real Night, andCousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
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