Sunflower
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful actress of the 1920s faces painful decisions about her lovers and her future in Rebecca West's posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel
Star of the stage, Sunflower has everything but the attention she craves from her long-time—and married—lover, Lord Essington, a brilliant and intense man occupied with more intellectual thoughts. Eager for a more rewarding experience, Sunflower must decide whether another "great man," the Australian Francis Pitt, will offer a more traditional relationship and happiness. Written during West's own psychoanalysis and never finished, Sunflower ponders topics of the power struggle between the sexes, and a woman's freedom to determine her romantic destiny.
Drawn heavily from West's own relationships with H.G. Wells and Lord Beaverbrook, this roman à clef gives a glimpse of the author's own struggle to find a satisfying relationship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perhaps understandably, the distinguished novelist, journalist and woman-of-letters never completed this novel she wrote in the 1920s, an outright roman a clef based on her affairs with H. G. Wells and the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. Sunflower is the name of the central character, a beautiful, rich actress externally unlike her creator but internally similar in some interesting ways, as Dame Rebecca's authorized biographer Victoria Glendinning makes wonderfully clear in an illuminating afterword. Sunflower's long affair with the Wells character, Lord Essingtona scandal in its time that only an avowed feminist of West's courage would darehad run its course. In its wake she forms a relationship with Francis Pitt (as West did with Beaverbrook), a most unsatisfactory liaison. The powerful public woman was deep within an "eternally feminine'' one desiring marriage and family, home and security. Sunflower enacts these deep wishes, longing for what she cannot attain. As the affairs resolved nothing in life, the author entered psychoanalysis, and one can speculate that the novel's incompletion had much to do with her basic irresolution. As fiction, this is not altogether satisfactory, but it is nonetheless a striking study in the relation of art and life, autobiography and imagination, fact and fantasy.
