Notes on the Effect of Mr. Max Beerbohm on a Woman Writer

Although Regina Barreca, the feminist comic theorist, has lamented the anxiety that supposedly keeps women from joking at the expense of those who have hurt them, Dame Rebecca West (1892–1983), the British novelist and critic, felt no such compunction. The laughter, moreover, that underpinned West’s “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” from Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931), was very angry indeed, and its origins were both political and personal. Her comic assault on Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was a defense of working women in general, and of professional female authors in particular, against his attacks on their wish to be self-sustaining and competent human beings, rather than anachronistic ornaments. It was also, however, a response rooted in private grievance, for West was both an avowed admirer and an emulator of Beerbohm’s satirical and fantastic narratives, and she deeply resented his failure to respect her as she respected him. Indeed, it is impossible to understand West’s modernist fiction, such as Harriet Hume (1929), without acknowledging its debt to Beerbohm and to his 1890s Aesthetic Movement male contemporaries, such as Oscar Wilde, from whom she derived many of her comic strategies.