Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson--New Women in Search of Love and Power

Hertog looks at two women writers born at the end of the Victorian era who tried boldly, if not always successfully, to negotiate the post-Victorian social upheavals. Although they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson were confidantes with much in common. Pioneering feminists, their professional successes couldn’t compensate for massive personal unhappiness. Both had insecure childhoods: West, had a gambler father whose abandonment of his family determined West’s attitude toward men, human nature, parenthood, and women’s rights. Thompson was a child when her mother died of a self-induced abortion. Both women were also unhappy in love and parenthood: West had a famously abusive relationship with the married H.G. Wells that produced a son, Anthony, whom she resented and rejected. Thompson’s marriage to novelist Sinclair Lewis was disastrous, and their neglected son, a lackluster actor, gravely disappointed her. West became a formidable writer, and Thompson awakened America to the fascist threat in numerous articles, lectures, and radio shows. But in her later years, her anti-Zionism and self-righteousness diminished her popularity. Even though West’s career and personal dramas overshadow Thompson’s, Hertog (Anne Morrow Lindbergh) delivers a perceptive, engrossing warts-and-all biography of two brilliant women who were their own worst enemies. 30 b&w photos. (Nov.)