ArticleAuthors: Sue Thomas (1998)
In 1925 Rebecca West began working on a new novel, Sunflower; never completed, it was published posthumously by Virago Press in 1986, with an Afterword by West's official biographer, Victoria Glendinning, in which she reveals the novel to be a roman a clef This confessional mode of reading Sunflower removes its political context and overlooks effects which function in the novel as an implicit commentary on early twentieth-century British sexual modernism. To restore these representations of sexuality in Sunflower, one has to read against the grain of confessional transparency. A critical, contradictory feminism is integral to the generic layers of West's modernist fiction and the inte... 
