FAIRFIELD, Cecily (or Cicily) Isabel (aka Cissie, Panther) [Rebecca West, Rachel East, Conway Power], DBE, m. Andrews, born London 21 Dec. 1892, died London 15 March 1983. Journalist, novelist, critic, travel-writer, feminist and political commentator. Daughter of Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, governess, pianist and copy-typist, and Charles Fairfield, Irish-born soldier, journalist and entrepreneur.

After Charles Fairfield abandoned the family in 1901 (dying in 1906), their mother took the three children from London to her native Edinburgh, where they lived in Hope Park Square (represented in Rebecca West's novel, The Judge) and Buccleuch Place. Cecily Fairfield was educated as a scholarship student at George Watson's Ladies’ College, winning ‘Best Essay’ prize, 1906—7. She campaigned for women's suffrage and at 14 published a letter in The Scotsman (16 October 1907) on ‘Women's Electoral Claims’, writing later: ‘Scotland has come out of the militant suffrage agitation very well indeed. There is something magnificently dramatic about the way the Scottish woman … has quietly gone about her warfare’ (West [1911] 1982, p.192). Her first, unpublished, novel, ‘The Sentinel’, written in her late teens, portrays its heroine's sexual and political awakening during suffrage unrest. The Judge (1922), featuring a young Edinburgh suffragette, was described by Hugh MacDiarmid as ‘unfortunately — the best Scottish novel of recent years’ (MacDiarmid, [1926], 1995, p. 346).

Cecily was the youngest of three siblings. Her sister Josephine Letitia (Lettie) Denny Fairfield (1885-1978) qualified in medicine, Edinburgh 1907, then studied law and became a medical administrator; she supervised women doctors in the First World War and was made CBE in 1919. Winifred (Winnie) Fairfield (1887-1960), to whom Cecily was close, trained as a teacher. All three sisters, young socialists and suffragists, joined the Fabian Society. The family moved back to London in 1910, where 17-year-old Cecily studied for a year at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked briefly as an actor. She soon turned to journalism, publishing her first theatre review in the Evening Standard and writing for a new feminist journal, The Freewoman. Taking the pseudonym ‘Rebecca West’ from a strong-willed character in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm, she swiftly established a reputation with her often iconoclastic writing; other pieces appeared in the Daily News and socialist Clarion.