Listen free for 30 days
-
Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl
- Narrated by: Kathleen Godwin
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Listen with a free trial
Buy Now for £24.19
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Beautiful Exile
- The Life of Martha Gellhorn
- By: Carl Rollyson
- Narrated by: John Stamper
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Martha Gellhorn died in February 1998, just shy of her 90th birthday. Well before her death, she had become a legend. She reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and her travel books have become classics. Her marriage to Ernest Hemingway and affairs with legendary lovers like H. G. Wells, and her relationship with two presidents, Roosevelt and Kennedy, reflect her campaigns against tyranny and deprivation, and her outrage at the corruption and cruelty of modern governments.
-
Facades
- By: John Pearson
- Narrated by: Frazer Douglas
- Length: 28 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were the children of possibly the most selfish and mismatched couple in the annals of the British aristocracy. They became in the 1920s, in Cyril Connolly's words, 'a dazzling monument to the English scene... had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' John Pearson describes the public and private life of this strangest and most flamboyant of literary families.
-
-
Absolutely fascinating
- By Mary on 07-11-18
-
Margaret Fuller
- A New American Life
- By: Megan Marshall
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
-
Old Thunder
- A Life of Hilaire Belloc
- By: Joseph Pearce
- Narrated by: Kevin F. Spalding
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hilaire Belloc is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. At turns reviled or revered, depending on the audience, he was a razor sharp social commenter and a master of both poetry and prose who continues to captivate readers. In Old Thunder, Joseph Pearce examines Belloc's enduring impact on British intellectual life.
-
-
What a disappointment!
- By margherita morgante on 28-03-20
-
Updike
- By: Adam Begley
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 20 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike - a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work. In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America.
-
-
Waspish about the Eastwick WASP?
- By Welsh Mafia on 06-09-15
-
Joy
- Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
- By: Abigail Santamaria
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis' memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to your ears in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and '40s.
-
-
I love Joy Davidman.
- By MamikieMatatso on 28-01-22
-
Beautiful Exile
- The Life of Martha Gellhorn
- By: Carl Rollyson
- Narrated by: John Stamper
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Martha Gellhorn died in February 1998, just shy of her 90th birthday. Well before her death, she had become a legend. She reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and her travel books have become classics. Her marriage to Ernest Hemingway and affairs with legendary lovers like H. G. Wells, and her relationship with two presidents, Roosevelt and Kennedy, reflect her campaigns against tyranny and deprivation, and her outrage at the corruption and cruelty of modern governments.
-
Facades
- By: John Pearson
- Narrated by: Frazer Douglas
- Length: 28 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were the children of possibly the most selfish and mismatched couple in the annals of the British aristocracy. They became in the 1920s, in Cyril Connolly's words, 'a dazzling monument to the English scene... had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' John Pearson describes the public and private life of this strangest and most flamboyant of literary families.
-
-
Absolutely fascinating
- By Mary on 07-11-18
-
Margaret Fuller
- A New American Life
- By: Megan Marshall
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
-
Old Thunder
- A Life of Hilaire Belloc
- By: Joseph Pearce
- Narrated by: Kevin F. Spalding
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hilaire Belloc is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. At turns reviled or revered, depending on the audience, he was a razor sharp social commenter and a master of both poetry and prose who continues to captivate readers. In Old Thunder, Joseph Pearce examines Belloc's enduring impact on British intellectual life.
-
-
What a disappointment!
- By margherita morgante on 28-03-20
-
Updike
- By: Adam Begley
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 20 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike - a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work. In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America.
-
-
Waspish about the Eastwick WASP?
- By Welsh Mafia on 06-09-15
-
Joy
- Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
- By: Abigail Santamaria
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis' memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to your ears in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and '40s.
-
-
I love Joy Davidman.
- By MamikieMatatso on 28-01-22
-
The Girl from the Fiction Department
- A Portrait of Sonia Orwell
- By: Hilary Spurling
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absorbing and provocative, a biography of George Orwell's controversial second wife from the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Matisse the Master and Anthony Powell. Just three months before his death, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four took a new wife. Sonia Brownell was a model for Julia in Orwell's most famous novel, she was 15 years younger than her husband, and after his death she was hounded and pilloried as a manipulative gold-digger who would stop at nothing to keep control of the literary legacy. But the truth about Sonia was altogether different.
-
Louisa May Alcott
- The Woman Behind Little Women
- By: Harriet Reisen
- Narrated by: Harriet Reisen
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; and the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain.
-
-
Excellent book, poor narration
- By Clare on 21-10-12
-
How to Create the Perfect Wife
- By: Wendy Moore
- Narrated by: Daniel Pirrie
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of how Thomas Day, a young man of means, decided he could never marry a woman with brains, spirit or fortune. Instead, he adopted two orphan girls from a Foundling Hospital, and set about educating them to become the meek, docile women he considered marriage material. Unsurprisingly, Day's marriage plans did not run smoothly.
-
-
Fascinating history lesson on Georgian England
- By Amazon Customer on 17-06-22
-
Paradise Lost
- A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.
-
-
A cut above
- By SRE on 28-01-22
-
Peggy Guggenheim
- The Shock of the Modern
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a listen of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of 21st-century art as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs.
-
-
worth a listen
- By Peck on 09-05-22
-
Shirley Jackson
- A Rather Haunted Life
- By: Ruth Franklin
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Known to millions mainly as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
-
-
Fascinating listen
- By Mrs. A. Foss on 16-09-21
-
Young Romantics
- The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives
- By: Daisy Hay
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective - celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt.
-
-
Perfect for a TV series
- By Teresa Gamble on 22-12-13
-
Betjeman
- By: A. N. Wilson
- Narrated by: Bill Wallis
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
John Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the 20th century. His collected poems sold over two million copies. As Poet Laureate, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet led a tempestuous emotional life. This book was written using the vast archive of personal material relating to Betjeman's private life.
-
-
Captivating biography better than most novels
- By Julie Bail on 26-09-10
-
Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters
- By: Laura Thompson
- Narrated by: Maggie Mash
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They were known as the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as 'bright young things' in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark - and very public - differences in their outlooks came to symbolize the political polarities of a dangerous decade.
-
-
This Book Does Add Something New
- By Alison on 25-07-16
-
The Invisible Man
- By: H. G. Wells
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A mysterious stranger in a long-sleeved coat, with a bandaged face and wide-brimmed hat, arrives in a small English village. But his incongruous appearance is nothing compared to the secret of the clandestine experiments he is undertaking...With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at The Coach and Horses - is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling....
-
-
Classic science fiction
- By Squeaky Joe on 18-03-18
-
Storyteller
- The Life of Roald Dahl
- By: Donald Sturrock
- Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
- Length: 23 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Roald Dahl is one of the greatest storytellers of all time. He pushed children's literature into uncharted territory and almost twenty years after his death his popularity continues to grow - worldwide sales of his books have now topped 100 million. The man behind the stories, however, remains an enigma. Dahl was a single-minded adventurer, an eternal child, and his public persona was often controversial.
-
-
Thoroughly enjoyed it, despite minor flaws
- By Amazon Customer on 05-10-11
-
The Fall of the House of Wilde
- Oscar Wilde and His Family
- By: Emer O'Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Fall of the House of Wilde for the first time places Oscar Wilde as a member of one of the most dazzling Anglo-Irish families of Victorian times and in the broader social, political and religious context. A remarkable and perceptive account, this is a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, a man whose own fall from grace in a trial as public as his father's marked the end of fin de siècle decadence.
-
-
Intelligent and thought provoking.
- By Campesque on 29-01-18
Summary
This second edition of Carl Rollyson's standard biography begins with a portrait that attempts to evoke the living person in all her dimensions. It concludes with an interview with one of her favorite secretaries, Elizabeth Leyshon, who eluded him in the 1990s but provided new insights into her employer's character for this book.
The biography's new title emphasizes that Rebecca West was a prophet - one not always appreciated in her own day. As early as 1917, she understood where the world was headed and realized that the revolution in Russia held out false hope. Because she took this view as a socialist, those on the left scorned her as an apostate, whereas she understood that Communism would result in a disaster for the British left. Those wishing to gauge the range of West's fiction and nonfiction should listen to Woman as Artist and Thinker, published by iUniverse.
Rollyson has made his words anew, sharpening sentences, omitting words and paragraphs - sometimes entire sections - in order to provide a refreshing, more engaging, and spirited account of one of the world's major writers.
What listeners say about Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Robyn
- 18-09-15
Well written biography of a boring subject
I struggled through the first half of this book, but couldn't bring myself to move onto the second half. Carl Rollyson writes well and his account of West's life is comprehensive and full of quotes and anecdotes so West's personality and life are presented in fine detail. Kathleen Godwin has a very pleasant voice and her narration is easy-on-the-ear and competent. So my only problem is with the subject. I have read a lot of biographies of unpleasant characters, but their stories are worth knowing because they are interesting and (usually) have something to say about life and the human condition. I found West both unlikable and uninteresting. Despite her obvious talent as writer and critic and her flair for language, she came across to me as self-absorbed and self-indulgent. She was certainly capable of clever observation but this talent was negated by her habit of sharing her insights via catty and cruel remarks. Her life seemed to be a round of unsatisfactory affairs, illnesses, arguments with 'HG', and what to do with their son, Anthony. The only downside for me in not finishing this book is I will have to look elsewhere to see how poor Anthony fared in the end after the emotional neglect he suffered at the hands of his parents.
2 people found this helpful