The last book that the eighty-nine-year-old novelist Rebecca West published during her long and distinguished career was 1900: a beautifully illustrated account of the most decisive cultural and political events that occurred not only in Britain but also across the globe during this pivotal year. Amid her wide-ranging discussion of such dispersed phenomena as the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, the tidal wave that swept the Texas coast, and the evident decline in Queen Victoria’s health, West – who took her professional name from Henrik Ibsen’s forthright heroine in Rosmersholm (1886) – turns her attention to the unsettled literary climate in England at the turn of the century. Her inquiries for the most part focus less on drama and poetry and more on fiction: the genre in which she would firmly establish her reputation, some years after she started contributing her frequently irreverent articles – ones that did not hesitate to attack established figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Mary Augusta Ward, and H. G. Wells – to the Clarion (a socialist newspaper founded by Robert Blatchford in 1891) and the Freewoman (a sexually progressive feminist journal published in 1911 and 1912). ‘In Great Britain’, West writes, ‘the literature of 1900 did little to dispel the curious preoccupation of the time. Fiction was the thing and it had developed along perilous lines.