Inventory of another country: Rebecca West and the legacy of 1918

Abstract

Written in the late 1930s, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is shaped on every level by the Great War. West investigates the causes of the conflict in the place from which it originated, calling urgently for a defence of the settlement of Versailles. Her project of persuasion raises general entertainment to the heights of modernist epic and contemporary myth. At the same time, the text’s critique of imperial interference shows the inconsistent global application of the principle of the ‘rights of small nations’. Using the frameworks of psychoanalysis popularized in the anglophone world during the 1920s, West identifies individual struggle with the dilemmas of history, and diagnoses the nature and limits of social change that followed in the wake of 1918.