From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps understandably, the distinguished novelist, journalist and woman-of-letters never completed this novel she wrote in the 1920s, an outright roman a clef based on her affairs with H. G. Wells and the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. Sunflower is the name of the central character, a beautiful, rich actress externally unlike her creator but internally similar in some interesting ways, as Dame Rebecca's authorized biographer Victoria Glendinning makes wonderfully clear in an illuminating afterword. Sunflower's long affair with the Wells character, Lord Essingtona scandal in its time that only an avowed feminist of West's courage would darehad run its course. In its wake she forms a relationship with Francis Pitt (as West did with Beaverbrook), a most unsatisfactory liaison. The powerful public woman was deep within an "eternally feminine" one desiring marriage and family, home and security. Sunflower enacts these deep wishes, longing for what she cannot attain. As the affairs resolved nothing in life, the author entered psychoanalysis, and one can speculate that the novel's incompletion had much to do with her basic irresolution. As fiction, this is not altogether satisfactory, but it is nonetheless a striking study in the relation of art and life, autobiography and imagination, fact and fantasy.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Never completed or previously published, Sunflower is a fictional record of a shattering period in West's life: the end of her lengthy relationship with H. G. Wells and her misdirected passion for the colorful Lord Beaverbrook. The novel's protagonist is Sybil "Sunflower" Fassendyll, actress and popular beauty of the 1920s, who leads a miserable private life despite wealth and fame. Insecure without male admiration, Sunflower struggles with the increasing aridity of her 10-year liaison with brilliant, married Lord Essington. At last she breaks with him in hopes of conventional happiness with Francis Pitt, a charismatic public figure. Here the plot stops, but West's outline confirms that Sunflower's romantic fortune would parallel her own. A fascinating psychological portrait of female anxiety. For larger collections. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
