Editing Rebecca West (section)

===Old age===

Her husband became both sleepy and inattentive as he got older. The sleepiness led to a car accident where no one was hurt but Henry was charged with dangerous driving. He became obsessed with the Norwegian ballerina [[Gerd Larsen]]; he would refuse to travel with West, instead preferring to return to London to be with Larsen. West initially considered this to be purely her husband's infatuation, but came to think that Larsen was driven by money. At her husband's funeral West had the upsetting problem of Larsen's request to be among the mourners, even though she had only known him for 18 months. Henry's will left £5,000 for Larsen.<ref name=gibb>{{cite book|last=Gibb|first=Lorna|title=West's World: The Life and Times of Rebecca West|year=2013|publisher=Macmillan|location=London|isbn=978-0230771499|page=contents|url=https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0230771491}}</ref> After her husband's death in 1968, West discovered that he had been unfaithful with other women.<ref name=gibb/>

After she was widowed, she moved to London, where she bought a spacious apartment overlooking [[Hyde Park, London|Hyde Park]]. Unfortunately, it was next door to the Iranian embassy. During the [[Iranian Embassy Siege|May 1980 incident]], West, then 87, had to be evacuated.<ref>{{harvnb|Rollyson|1996|pp=413–4}}</ref> In the last two decades of her life, West kept up a very active social life, making friends with [[Martha Gellhorn]], [[Doris Lessing]], [[Bernard Levin]], comedian [[Frankie Howerd]], and film star and director [[Warren Beatty]], who filmed her for the production ''[[Reds (film)|Reds]]'', a biography of journalist [[John Reed (journalist)|John Reed]] and his connection with the [[Russian Revolution (1917)|Russian Revolution]]. She also spent time with scholars such as [[Jane Marcus]] and Bonnie Kime Scott, who began to chronicle her feminist career and varied work.<ref>Jane Marcus, ''The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–17'', Indiana University Press, 1982, p. x; Bonnie Kime Scott, ''Refiguring Modernism'' (Vol. 1), Indiana University Press, 1995, p. xli.</ref> She wrote at an unabated pace, penning masterful reviews for ''[[The Sunday Telegraph]]'', publishing her last novel ''The Birds Fall Down'' (1966), and overseeing the film version of the story by [[BBC]] in 1978. The last work published in her lifetime was ''1900'' (1982). ''1900'' explored the last year of [[Victoria of the United Kingdom|Queen Victoria]]'s long reign, which was a watershed in many cultural and political respects.

At the same time, West worked on sequels to her autobiographically inspired novel ''The Fountain Overflows'' (1957); although she had written the equivalent of two more novels for the planned trilogy, she was never satisfied with the sequels and did not publish them. She also tinkered at great length with an autobiography, without coming to closure, and started scores of stories without finishing them. Much of her work from the late phase of her life was published posthumously, including ''Family Memories'' (1987), ''This Real Night'' (1984), ''Cousin Rosamund'' (1985), ''The Only Poet'' (1992), and ''Survivors in Mexico'' (2003). Unfinished works from her early period, notably ''Sunflower'' (1986) and ''The Sentinel'' (2001) were also published after her death, so that her ''oeuvre'' was augmented by about one third by posthumous publications.