Well, yuck, but luckily [Rebecca West], despite some internal conflict, ignored him. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her greatest work, is still required reading for anyone who even brushes by the Balkans. And her writing for The New Yorker and The Daily Telegraph on the post-war treason trials, the Nuremberg Trials and the nature of crime and punishment, is great literature. Which is why once again, these essays have just been reprinted in A Train of Powder (Ivan R. Dee, 310 pages, $26.95) and The Meaning of Treason (Phoenix Press, 420 pp., $29.95).

West sees. In Nuremberg, at one of the villas taken by the conquerors, she discovers a one-legged German man, who has reduced his life to producing cyclamens in a battered greenhouse, on an obscure part of the property. In the first essay, West shows us how determined the German survivors were, that this man had escaped to another dimension where pain had no power over him. He had escaped into his work. By the second, he has grown into this nightmare figure who grows giant cyclamens amid the stink of death and torture. The pitiable detail of this old man's life clarifies the entire overwhelming monstrosity of Nuremberg and the trials, and is framed by stern muscular discussions of truth, loyalty, diplomacy, and above all, the standards and principles by which all of us must live, or else descend to the levels of the Nazi or Stalinist.

West is not an easy read. She rivals Proust or Henry James in her complexity. The shorter essays that deal with a KKK trial in the American South and a very peculiar murder committed in the depths of the English lower-middle or scrambling class have clarity and punch. Nevertheless, they do not hold a candle to West's treatment of the big themes.

Elizabeth Nickson is a National Post columnist.

Rebecca West is, perhaps, known more for her vivid and sometimes very unhappy personal life than for her writing. Born Cicely Fairfax, one of three daughters of an unlucky couple, her father left them when she was eight.

A somewhat feckless journalist, he made attempts at success in Australia and the United States, and ended badly in Liverpool. Cicely, with that example firmly in mind, was, by an early age, determined to make a life for herself.

And so she did. By 19, she was considered one of the more interesting and savage reviewers around, even lionized a little, for the sheer verve of her daring in slamming Tolstoy and calling T.S. Eliot a fake, at a time when others believed both were immortal. She wrote for one of the first feminist magazines and became a fierce socialist, at exactly the right moment to do both.

By 20, she met the man who was to define her romantic life, the round, middle-aged and remarkably selfish H.G.Wells, who stood astride English literature like a titan, in the 1920s. The affair was over by the time Rebecca was 30, but by then she was a considerable force in the British literary world, and she had a son, conceived the second time she and the happily married Wells were together.

West, who took her nom de plume from one of Ibsen's characters, went on to marry, write several novels and, when commissioned, a lot of reportage. Her journalism and non-fiction essays overshadow her story-telling, though like most journalists, she considered her non- fiction work both less important and less interesting. It most decidedly is not. She also very badly wanted, as women did in those days, to be a "woman," which was defined then by Jung or Freud.

As her biographer Victoria Glendinning points out, at the beginning of the last century, women were not thought to be capable of abstract thinking. Jung thought that a woman who took on a masculine profession "develops a kind of rigid intellectuality based on so-called principles and backs them up with a whole host of arguments which always just miss the mark in the most irritating way and always inject a little something into the argument that is not there." Such a woman, thought Jung, was injuring the "meaning of her femininity."

Well, yuck, but luckily West, despite some internal conflict, ignored him. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her greatest work, is still required reading for anyone who even brushes by the Balkans. And her writing for The New Yorker and The Daily Telegraph on the post-war treason trials, the Nuremberg Trials and the nature of crime and punishment, is great literature. Which is why once again, these essays have just been reprinted in A Train of Powder (Ivan R. Dee, 310 pages, $26.95) and The Meaning of Treason (Phoenix Press, 420 pp., $29.95).

Her Selected Letters were published earlier this fall, but, by comparison, they are People magazine commentary on the work of the woman herself. The essays are far more important, designed it seems, just to show readers what they are missing not having such a searing, muscular, and supple mind grappling with today's grotesqueries and, by way of a taunt, to show all us hacks just how high the bar is.

And, honey, hang your head in shame, it's high. For not only did West write beautifully in a culture that admired good writing almost above anything, she lived in stirring, tragic times. The Nuremberg trials provided her with one of the great set pieces ever. It would be hard to find a more terrifying and pitiable situation than those particular trials, which put on display the great horrors of the death camps.

West does this giant subject absolute justice, without the flaw of sentiment or lion hunting, and allows us to see into both the culture that produced the death camps, the men who designed and implemented the Final Solution, and the men who, with great weariness, attempted to make sure that such a horror never again occurred.

In three long essays, collectively called "In Greenhouse with Cyclamens," West's sentences, long and discursive, and almost without punctuation, show just what a great writer, who has long graduated from clever quips and tweaking of the powerful, can do to illumine the human heart and the tortured confusions of actual life.

West sees. In Nuremberg, at one of the villas taken by the conquerors, she discovers a one-legged German man, who has reduced his life to producing cyclamens in a battered greenhouse, on an obscure part of the property. In the first essay, West shows us how determined the German survivors were, that this man had escaped to another dimension where pain had no power over him. He had escaped into his work. By the second, he has grown into this nightmare figure who grows giant cyclamens amid the stink of death and torture. The pitiable detail of this old man's life clarifies the entire overwhelming monstrosity of Nuremberg and the trials, and is framed by stern muscular discussions of truth, loyalty, diplomacy, and above all, the standards and principles by which all of us must live, or else descend to the levels of the Nazi or Stalinist.

The Meaning of Treason examines, at some length, the character of the traitor. After the second war, many young British men --William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), John Amery, as well as Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby -- betrayed Britain in the aid of one or another kind of fascist state. Some of these men were caught and put on trial, and West used these trials to conduct a profound investigation into the character and motives of a traitor.

This is stirring mostly because a fine mind, married to the point of view of a generalist, can dig so far behind the traitor's mask, grabbing a tiny detail and blowing it up, detailing the boredom of lives so lived, the profound alienation and inability to be comfortable and easy with their humanity, eventually showing us how such men fall in with the wrong crowd and end by doing us all damage.

West is not an easy read. She rivals Proust or Henry James in her complexity. The shorter essays that deal with a KKK trial in the American South and a very peculiar murder committed in the depths of the English lower-middle or scrambling class have clarity and punch. Nevertheless, they do not hold a candle to West's treatment of the big themes.

It is appropriate, perhaps, that these days, to women writers anyway, she is the immortal, and her tormentor H.G. Wells is relegated to the back seats of the cinema of literary life. West, who battled Communism, and whose son betrayed her over and over, whose later life was plagued by phantom viruses and years of what sounds like grisly day-long psychoanalysis, made tremendous mistakes in her life and her work.

But what we remember, and can still read, is pure genius -- the triumph of the creative will over mere circumstance, social restriction, and fate.