Really, Mr. Walpole!

Rebecca West photographed by Madame Yevonde. Wikimedia.

In 1918, British novelist Hugh Walpole decided to contact a critic who, in an article in The Daily News on the subject of someone else entirely, had made a fleeting remark about Walpole’s work that was painful enough to wound him. As it happens, that critic was Rebecca West, a fellow author also fam…