Where it all began

Laing’s doctorate on West’s work - a remarkable proliferation of novels, political comment, travelogues and journalism, which spanned most of the 20th century, was complete; yet she still lingered in the library stacks, browsing through dozens of boxes of papers when four exercise books caught her eye. There was something familiar about the handwriting, yet she didn’t recognise the text itself.

The notebooks appeared to be a draft of a novel entitled The Sentinel, written by someone called Isabel Lancashire.They had been catalogued as correspondence in the archive. They proved to be rather more exciting: the original manuscript of a Rebecca West novel. A work never before published and most probably never before read.

"It was hard to believe at first," recalls Laing. "I thought I must have made a mistake. I remember dashing off to find the curator. It was enormously exciting, because the material was so extraordinary."

That was in 1996. Laing then spent a year painstakingly transcribing the fragile exercise books. They are now published by the European Humanities Research Centre at Oxford University, introduced and annotated by Laing. She was able to date the start of manuscript to 1909 when 17-year-old Cicily Isabel Fairfield (who later adopted the name of an Ibsen character, Rebecca West, as her pseudonym) was still a schoolgirl at George Watson’s School in Edinburgh. A precocious, brilliant and already politically active schoolgirl, poised to leave the capital to begin an acting course at the RADA in London.

For a young girl in the early 1900s, West’s life had already been unusual. Born in Paddington in 1892, she was the youngest of three children - all girls. Her Irish father Charles was largely unsuccessful as a journalist, who abandoned his family in 1901 and sailed for Africa. He died in poverty without seeing any of them again. Her mother, Isabella Mackenzie, was Scottish, a gifted pianist who had earned her living before marriage as a governess to a wealthy family from whom she continued to receive an unsolicited but much-needed allowance. In 1902 mother and daughters returned to Isabella’s native Edinburgh and Cicily was enrolled at George Watson’s where her talents quickly shone. Though something of a tearaway (according to Laing), Cicily was encouraged academically and at the age of 14 she won the school’s junior essay prize. The same year (1907) she broke into print for the first time, with a remarkable letter to The Scotsman.

"Sir, - I was very much interested in the letter signed ‘Mater’ in this morning’s issue, as it seems to reflect no inconsiderable part of feminine opinion. The writer is not very clear as to her opening point. She denounces the NWSPU [National Women’s Social and Political Union] as unpatriotic on the declaration of war on the Liberal Government, independent of their divers personal political creeds. And why? Because it is the duty of women to support our Constitution against all revolutionary efforts; to, in short, defend the nation from Socialism. I, for one, cannot follow ‘Mater’ here ... I do not think that ‘Mater’ realises the profound national effects of the subjection of women on the nation. If she considers the position of women in the industrial field, if she thinks of the Cradley Heath chainmakers and the white-lead workers, surely she should realise it is a question affecting the Empire itself. While women have to endure such squalid physical agony to gain their daily bread, while children are born sightless and distorted, already tainted by lead poisoning, it is not only the duty of every woman, but every patriot to press this question before all others - and immediately. For not only is the sex degration implied in manhood suffrage dangerously near, but we are threatened by a Legal prevention of Married Women’s factory Employment Act - a magnificent measure, but without the guarantee of a legal share of a husband’s wages falling to the wife. Heaven knows what that will mean! It is obviously incumbent on every one whose eyes are open not only to the sufferings of women, but to the well-being of the nation, to accept the call to action of the NWSPU and to thank the noble women who are giving not only their time and labour, but not a little of their own private interests to this great cause. - I am &c."

The Scotsman does not receive quite such forceful letters from George Watson pupils today. And even though it is likely that Cicily was assisted by her elder sisters, the letter expresses the same concerns which the newly discovered novel displays and which delineate West’s territory as a commentator and novelist: women’s suffrage, their repressed sexuality, their treatment in the workplace, the legal quicksand of their statutory lack of property and the eternal tension between motherhood, the womanly virtues of hearth and home and political awareness.

It would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate start to the centenary year for the campaign for women’s suffrage than the publication of West’s lost manuscript. The rallies she attended in Edinburgh as a girl left a lifelong impression. In 1907, West wrote a letter to her sister describing a horrific incident at a suffragette meeting in the city when the police moved in to arrest one of the speakers by force. First they beat her on the back and then they: "struck her again and again in the face. The two plain-clothes men arrested her and kept hitting her across the windpipe … The people were fearfully impressed by the fact that she held the purple, white and green flag high above her head the whole time."

In The Sentinel West follows her heroine, Adela, all the way to jail and the horror of force-feeding.

"She was tied down with a towel onto a plank bed, a wardress sitting on her knees and two others holding her arms. The doctor, gripping her head tightly between his knees, was sawing away at her gums with the edge of a steel gag to get her to open her mouth. She resisted quite coolly and the doctor signed to a wardress to hold the girl’s nose, pressing the nostrils together and throwing her whole weight on the face. Even that she withstood, so at last he took the top of her head and the wardress her chin, and by both pulling they managed to insert the gag. The doctor then proceeded to force down her throat a large India rubber tube. She felt as if he was killing her. The tube seemed to go down forever. She could not breathe. The drums of her ears seemed to be bursting and the top of her head coming off … The doctor raised the funnel at the end of the tube and poured in a tumblerful of milk."

The clear brutality of this description indicates the confidence of the writer, despite her extreme youth. As Professor Martin McLaughlin, director of the European Humanities Research Centre (EHRC), which published The Sentinel this week, remarks: "This is an enormously important manuscript. It sheds important light on both Rebecca West’s journalism and on her fiction. It is, in effect, the DNA of a writer."

Yet The Sentinel is both unrevised and unfinished. West quickly abandoned it and reworked the female suffrage material and the central character into another novel simply entitled Adela, which she also left uncompleted. Laing suggests that West was unsatisfied with both attempts.

"Her scope was always so ambitious, so encyclopaedic, but she did have a problem with structure and with endings."

The same might be said of West’s personal life. She left RADA after only a year and began to write full-time, contributing artcles to the London Evening Standard and the Freewoman for which she was feted as a prodigy. Ford Maddox Ford introduced her to HG Wells, whom she "stalked" by the characteristically feminine method of writing a scarifying review of his latest book, The Marriage.

"Mr Wells is the Old Maid among novelists," she wrote. "Even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids." As a come-hither device, it worked perfectly. They began a ten-year affair during which West became pregnant and bore Wells a son, Anthony, who later claimed to have led a bleak, neglected childhood, ignored by his father and resented by his mother. Wells refused to leave his wife and marry West, they eventually parted and she began a series of other liaisons including one with Lord Beaverbrook. Eventually she married the banker Henry Andrews and remained married to him for 40 years, most of them celibate by his choice. After his death she wrote: "I get the impression that I married an odd but very nice man who to all intents and purposes died about seven years after we were married and I have been living with a zombie ever since."

Though she once declared herself "a failure as a woman", no-one considered her a failure as a writer. Her range and delivery still astonish, even if it is now generally agreed that her fiction is less dazzling than her commentary. GB Shaw once said of her: "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely."

That savage streak was exposed to dazzling effect when a collection of her letters was published in 2000 - 17 years after her death. The woman whom Bernard Levin described as "a formidable, even daunting personality, who did not suffer fools gladly, or indeed at all" allowed us a delicious final glimpse of her vicious wit.

Following a writers’ forum at the Edinburgh Festival, she wrote to an American friend: "There was that old fraud Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell, an unutterably disgusting creature called William Burroughs, an heir to the wealth of IBM and the author of a filthy book called The Naked Lunch, who was much publicised as another drug addict, and that stupid lout Norman Mailer. The party conversation was unbelievably filthy. Laurence Durrell asked me if I had ever been sodomised and told me it was most enjoyable."

The female sex which she championed at a political level does not escape her acid observation at a personal one. The Duchess of Windsor she described as "vulgar and trivial". Novelist Elizabeth Jenkins was a "disordered blonde", while Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Isadora Duncan she declared "awful. Isadora might have been a bloat and she was certainly a bore, but she moved beautifully, while Vanessa is made so awkwardly she is the shape of an unskilled undertaker’s apprentice’s first attempt at making a coffin."

I wonder if West’s school reports from George Watson’s assessed any of her failings with such brutality. Though she was made a Dame in 1959, from the mid-1970s until her death her literary influence slowly waned, and some even belittled her achievements. But, in the centenary year of women’s suffrage campaigning, it seems more appropriate to celebrate them in all their breathtaking range, even if we do so under the heading preferred by her biographer: "Elusive giant".