Sunflower - Hardcover

West, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860687198 ISBN 13: 9780860687191

Publisher: Random House, Inc., 1992

Synopsis

West’s posthumously published semi-autobiographical novelâ now available as an ebook
A beautiful actress of the 1920s faces painful decisions about her lovers and her future
Star of the stage, Sunflower has everything but the attention she craves from her long-timeâ and marriedâ lover, Lord Essington, a brilliant and intense man occupied with more intellectual thoughts. Eager for a more rewarding experience, Sunflower must decide whether another “great man,” the Australian Francis Pitt, will offer a more traditional relationship and happiness. Written during West’s own psychoanalysis and never finished, Sunflower ponders topics of the power struggle between the sexes, and a woman’s freedom to determine her romantic destiny. Drawn heavily from West’s own relationships with H.G. Wells and Lord Beaverbrook, this roman à clef gives a glimpse of the author’s own struggle to find a satisfying relationship.

About this title

About the Author

Dame Rebecca West was a British writer, journalist, and literary critic. West initially trained as an actress, but soon found her calling as a writer after having several essays and editorial pieces on politics and women s suffrage published in prominent magazines such as The Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald TribuneA Train of Powder, The Meaning of Treason, and The New Meaning of Treason. She also wrote works of fiction, including the acclaimed The Return of the Soldier, and the autobiographical Aubrey trilogy, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. A respected journalist and intellectual figure, West died in 1983 at the age of 90.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House, Inc.
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0860687198
• ISBN 13: 9780860687191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304