Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: The Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1941.
2 vols.; 8vo.; green cloth; offsetting to endpapers; light soiling; wear to extremities; rubbing and light soiling to jackets; chip to head of spine of jacket of vol. 1 with loss of text; tear to spine fold and chipping to corners of same; chip to rear spine fold of jacket of vol. 2; additional later-issue jacket on vol. one. In two specially made quarter-morocco slipcases.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Pavel Yevlich, Apologetically I present this as the least I can do on a great subject— Gratefully I present it because of all the subject has done for me! Rebecca West[.] 23rd February: 1942.
Considered one of the great works, if not the masterpiece, of 20th-century travel literature, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has recently been examined more closely by feminist scholars for its complex portrayal of gender and power relations within the shifting political and cultural landscape of Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War. Claiming the book as a model for a feminist historical methodology, Bernhard Schweizer argues that Black Lamb repudiates “masculine conquest, both in form and ideology” and “exhorts women to resist the ‘masculine frenzy’ by developing their artistic, philosophical, political, and economic potentials to the fullest possible extent.” Lene Hansen cites the way the book “interweave(s) gender into political relations from the level of the household, the village, the nation and the international,” as well as the way it “disturbs any fixed notions of masculinity and femininity.”
An account of West’s travels through Yugoslavia in the late 1930’s, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’s publication coincided with the Nazi invasion of that country in 1941, an event that West darkly alludes to in the book’s dedication: “My friends in Yugoslavia/ who are now all dead or enslaved.” One of those friends was Pavle Yevlich . . .
Sources
Hansen, Lene. Security, Subjectivity, and Experiential Epistemology- Rethinking Feminist Security Studies through a Feminist Classic: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Paper presented at The First European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPR), 21-23 January, 2009, Queen’s University, Belfast, Section 5, Panel 3.
Schweizer, Bernhard. Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002.
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