West, Dame Rebecca, pseudonym of Cicily Isabel Fairfield Andrews (1892-1983), British novelist, critic, and journalist, born in London, and educated in Edinburgh. At 19 she began calling herself Rebecca West after the feminist heroine of the Henrik Ibsen play Rosmersholm. An ardent feminist and a Fabian socialist (see Fabian Society), she turned to writing and while in her 20s won recognition as a novelist, literary critic, and political analyst.

West's first novel was Return of the Soldier (1918), which described the homecoming of a shell-shocked soldier but also expressed West's opinions concerning marriage. The Judge (1922) also expressed West's feminist concerns, including her views on the issues of unwed motherhood, stigma, and rape. Contrary to the conventions of her time, West maintained a ten-year relationship with the English author H.G. Wells and had a son, Anthony West, with him in 1914. Her major non-fiction work, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), is a perceptive study of Yugoslavia and an indictment of Nazism. West was greatly admired as a journalist for her psychological understanding and analytical skills. Her reports on the treason trials of Britons after World War II for The New Yorker magazine were republished in The Meaning of Treason (1947). Collections of her non-fiction writings include A Train of Powder (1955), her collected reports on the Nuremberg Trials, and The New Meaning of Treason (1964). Intelligence, wit, and beautifully detailed settings and characterizations mark her novels, which include The Strange Necessity (1928), Harriet Hume (1929), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1956), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). She was made a DBE in 1959.