Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in London, later known by her pen name Rebecca West, journalist, novelist, and critic.
Cicily Isabel Fairfield was born on 21 December 1892 in Kerry Terrace, Alexandra Road, St John's Wood, London, to Charles Fairfield, an Anglo-Irish journalist and army officer, and Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, a Scottish pianist. She was the youngest of three daughters.
Her early life was marked by financial instability after her father abandoned the family in 1901, leaving her mother to raise three daughters largely on her own in Edinburgh. This experience of economic precarity, combined with exposure to intellectual and artistic conversation in her childhood home, shaped her fierce independence and her lifelong commitment to women's rights and social justice.
She adopted the pseudonym Rebecca West as a teenager, taken from a strong-willed character in Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm, initially to shield her family from the controversy of her outspoken feminist and socialist journalism. Under this name she would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary and political voices, authoring novels, literary criticism, and landmark reportage, including her monumental travelogue on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and her coverage of the Nuremberg Trials.
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