Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and the Art of Self-Reinvention

At her English country manor, the writer Rebecca West had two jersey cows: Primrose and Patience. She delighted in the fresh milk they produced, and in canning vegetables, and in making jam. As Julia Cooke writes in Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, her triple biography of West and her contemporaries Martha Gellhorn and Mickey Hahn, “When an editor at Viking proposed [West] do an entire book on the British Empire, she wrote to him about stewing fruit … ch...