Cicily Isabel Andrews, born Fairfield, and alias Rebecca West, was first a great journalist.

But she was also a feminist (like, in some ways, Willa Cather), a book reviewer and literary critic, a novelist, a biographer, a social satirist, and a travel writer

Her childhood in London was marked with poverty, the death of her father, and tuberculosis (like Thoreau,Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, or D.H. Lawrence)

Cicily was recognized early as a new literary personality.

Charlie Chaplin and the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook were among West's many lovers. In 1930 she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews. Their marriage was happy.