The Fountain Overflows

Name: The Fountain Overflows
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Rebecca West
ISBN: 9781590170342

by Rebecca West

5.0

(1 ratings)

432 pages2002New York Review of BooksISBN 9781590170342

Fiction History

About this book

The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare. In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.

Publication Details

Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2002
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9781590170342
Language: en

About Rebecca West

Cecily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for *The Times,* the *New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph* and *The New Republic,* and she was a correspondent for *The Bookman.* Her major works include *Black Lamb and Grey Falcon* (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; *A Train of Powder* (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in *The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason* (first published as a magazine article in 1945 and then expanded to the book in 1947), later *The New Meaning of Treason* (1964), a study of the trial of American-born fascist William Joyce and others; *The Return of the Soldier* (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, *The Fountain Overflows* (1956), *This Real Night* (published posthumously in 1984), and *Cousin Rosamund* (1985).