1900 by: Rebecca West

In 1900 Rebecca West was an eight-year-old girl living on the outskirts of London. Of that year, she remembers the aged Queen Victoria--a little bundle of black clothes propped up in an open horse-drawn carriage--and the ragged march down her suburban street that celebrated the relief of Mafeking in the far-off Boer War. This was a time when European empires covered much of the world, when North America was seen as a land of innocence and vast, untainted spaces, when imperialist dreams and confidence in the old social order were outwardly barely shaken. A certain order and style seemed to distinguish the period: the Boxer Rebellion in China was quickly suppressed; the Great Exhibition in Paris displayed the West's wild exuberance; fashionable society was dazzling; and the worlds of literature and art, music and drama, science and philosophy, were all flourishing. Henry James, Conrad, Chekhov, Sargent, Klimt, Munch, Elgar, Mahler, and Bergson were but a few of those who were producing m