H. G. Wells & Rebecca West [Hardcover]

Gordon Norton Ray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1974

From Lillian Hellman, 1974, NY Times- "It is surprising that Gordon Ray, scholar, one of the country's great bibliophiles, has allowed himself to fall in love with Rebecca West. As a woman I envy Miss West her distinguished admirer; as a reader I was often turned off and made suspicious. Mr. Ray's book is a collection of love letters, and some that aren't so loving, almost all of which were written by Wells to West. Miss West gave Mr. Ray copies she had made of her few letters that appear in this book. That in itself is odd. Ladies who make any copies of love letters are usually in the habit of making copies of all, particularly those who seem always to have known they were destined for history. This collection was put together with the aid and approval of Miss West, perhaps that's where the answer lies. Mr. Ray writes, "Miss West filled in the inevitable omissions of a narrative and set down with her accustomed force and wit how she herself regarded this period of her life ... As she approached eighty, she remarked 'her fair fame' was hardly an overriding consideration." My goodness. "Fair fame." When the English get humble it is time to take to the hills with a few questions, and one of them has to be why did Mr. Ray trust the memory of a lady who is over eighty? And who trusts anybody's memory of a love affair? The relationship between Wells and West began in 1913, when he was forty-six and she was a handsome and brilliant girl of twenty. They stayed together for 10 years and a child was born to them. By the time I grew up I had heard the distant cannon sounds of their affair and very much admired the two free spirits who helped to break the middle-class rules of my generation. But how I placed them in time is now so confused with my readings of Wells's books that I realized only many years later that I thought Wells was dead long before he really was only because I thought all well-known writers had died before I was born just to spite me......"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 215 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300017537
• ISBN-13: 978-0300017533
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,217,950 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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