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DIED. Rebecca West, 90, doyenne of British letters who brought erudition, compassion, feminism, high moral stance and ferocious wit to biographies, criticism, history, novels, political commentary and journalism; in London. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, she began contributing in 1911 to a radical feminist journal, then to socialist periodicals (taking as her name that of the strong-willed heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm). A precocious book critic, she attacked Writer H.G. Wells in a review, then had a ten-year affair with him and bore their son; in 1930, astonishing those who thought her a bohemian, she married a wealthy banker, with whom she lived happily until his death in 1968. The author of six novels, West employed her technique and psychological insights most trenchantly in nonfiction; in her masterworks, the 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia, and 1947's The Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II traitors, she raised reportage to the rank of literature. A vivid phrasemaker who valued intellectual rigor, she mourned in 1981: "It unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking."