Rebecca West

Cicily Isabel Fairfield, who adopted the pen name “Rebecca West” from Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, was born in London on December 21, 1892. She participated in sometimes-violent women’s rights demonstrations and moved in suffragist circles. Romantically linked with H. G. Wells and Charlie Chaplin, West ultimately married banker Henry Andrews. In 1948, Time magazine called her “indisputably the world’s Number One woman writer,” and in 1958 she was named Dame of the British Empire.