Name at birth: Cicily Isabel Fairfield

Rebecca West published her first novel in 1918, The Return of the Soldier. She is perhaps best known for her journalistic studies of the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg: The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955). In 1959 West was made a Dame of the British Empire, and in the late 1970s she gained new popularity, thanks largely to the feminist movement.