Books and Arts; Book Review;20th-century women; Dandy dames;

Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson were remarkable—by any standards;

Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, New Women in Search of Love and Power. By Susan Hertog.

Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West were career women long before the term had been invented. In the 1930s, when Thompson and West were making their mark as established professionals, a Gallup poll recorded that 82% of the American population believed women “should not have paying jobs outside the home” if their husbands were employed. Yet both women worked consistently from their early 20s in occupations that were almost entirely male-dominated—Thompson as a foreign correspondent and then a political commentator; West (pictured) as a literary critic, lauded novelist, historian and travel writer.

Susan Hertog's biography, an accomplished synthesis of these two lives and the remarkable parallels between them, is also a history of the 20th century, a study of female emancipation and literary culture, and an acute analysis of dysfunctional family life.

The most striking similarity between Thompson and West is their seemingly innate self-belief and fearlessness. On her 27th birthday in 1920 the American-born Thompson sailed for England. With no contacts but with portfolio in hand, her goal was to gain credentials as a freelance reporter and make her way across Europe to witness the aftermath of the revolution in Russia. By 1927 she was living in Berlin as the first female head of a news bureau in Europe. West, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish journalist who abandoned the family when she was eight, was a reviewer and essayist by the time she was 19, when “regardless of reputation” she published cutting critiques of established writers such as Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw. West wrote consistently until her death at 90 in 1983, and was in the enviable position of having Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, write to her, pleading: “Please write any story you want for us, fact or fiction.” In 1941 West published her best-known book, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”, a history of the Balkans and a meditation on the rise of Nazism.

Ms Hertog's style is frequently novelistic, which is less irritating than might be anticipated. In her description of Thompson's life in Berlin, for example, Ms Hertog assumes the voice of an omniscient narrator: “As Dorothy walked to the small office she kept on Motzstrasse, she remembered the first time she had met Rebecca…” Her writing style can be fanciful, as when Ms Hertog imagines the colour of Thompson's dress and how her hair might have been styled for her un-photographed first wedding. But it works well in the passages where the author attempts to draw out the romantic and family dramas which so defined the lives of both women.

When she was 21 West had an illegitimate son with H.G. Wells, 26 years her senior and then on his second wife, before marrying Henry Andrews, a banker, who was frequently unfaithful and suffered early from a form of dementia. Thompson was married three times and also had a son, with Sinclair Lewis, her second husband and winner of the Nobel prize in literature. Resentful of their mothers after lonely childhoods, both sons married young before abandoning their first wives, pursued unrealistic ambitions, and, when they proved unsuccessful, demanded lifelong financial assistance.

The danger of the book's title refers to the effects of their ambitions to be, as Thompson put it, “something no other woman has been yet”. Both women turned out to be poor parents, even if they came up to roughly the standard expected of working fathers of the time; both chose work and travel over their child, sent them away to school and placated them with lavish gifts. Ms Hertog poignantly renders the conflict between maternal instinct and the desire for realisation of ambition, backed by a fear of diminished “intellectual lustre” and of becoming lost in a “cocoon of domesticity”. Thompson and West undoubtedly chose work over family, but in doing so helped to break down barriers, not only for women journalists but for all working women.