ABSTRACT
Rebecca West’s magnum opus articulating ‘what a typical Englishwoman thought and felt’ is notoriously hard to classify. It does, certainly, record a visit to Yugoslavia in the spring of 1937, the last possible moment for an Easter holiday in that country before the War. In March 1938 Hitler’s armies invaded and annexed Austria, so that a politically aware person would hardly have gone to neighbouring Yugoslavia for a holiday; and even in 1937, as the book shows, the Yugoslav federation was menaced from within by the rancorous divisions between Croats and Serbs, and from without by pressure from Fascist Italy and Germany. Yet Rebecca West is clearly an exceptional rather than ‘typical’ Englishwoman. She is, naturally, reticent about her own personal history, and she plays down her own distinction as a writer, never mentioning her own reputation except to characterize one or two people by their responses to it
Nothing in my life had affected me more deeply than this journey through Yugoslavia…. This experience made me say to myself: ‘If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realized why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the result would have been interesting’ to historians. My situation, though probably not so fatal, is as interesting. Without doubt it was my duty to keep a record of it.
