conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Selected Letters of Rebecca West about Selected, Letters, Bonnie with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "I have many anecdotes to tell you--my life is a series of anecdotes," the author exclaimed in 1925, "all of which seem to me in the worst possible taste!" This teasing valediction is only one of the thousandfold pleasures within Selected Letters of the author. Bonnie Kime Scott has chosen over 200 sparkling, combative, and committed pieces of correspondence, and the result makes one wonder how she could bear to leave the other 9,800 or so out. the author (1892-1983) gave us some of the 20th century's greatest <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/014118065X/${0}">fiction</a> and <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140188479/${0}">nonfiction</a>, and her letters are equally artful. Scholars will be drawn in by her historical acuity, while others will seize on the author's sharp reportage and (of lesser import but equal joy) gossip. This "novelist-newshen" never seems to have been off duty, and bon mots abound. She dubbed George Bernard Shaw "a eunuch perpetually inflamed by flirtation," and found Queen Elizabeth's tragedy the fact that "the poor child spends her life asking questions which people answer! " In a 1960 letter, alas quoted only in a footnote, the author offered Oscar Wilde's son the definitive word on his progenitor's fate: "What your father did to little boys is not so criminal as what little boys did to your father's prose."