The Thinking Reed was published by Macmillan in London and Viking in New York in 1936. The title comes from Pascal (“Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed”) — and the novel examines what thinking avails when ranged against the forces of money, desire, and social pressure.
Isabelle Tarrant is an American woman — intelligent, self-possessed, recently widowed — living in France among the international rich. She decides, rationally, to marry Marc Sallafranque, a French automobile manufacturer: wealthy, decent, unimaginative. She does not love him — she loves another man, André de Douvres, who is unsuitable (married, unreliable, self-destructive). Her marriage to Marc is a rational choice: stability, comfort, an ordered life.
West traces what happens when intelligence attempts to govern emotion by will alone. Isabelle’s marriage is not unhappy — Marc is genuinely good to her — but it is insufficient: she has traded passion for security and finds that security, without passion, is merely a comfortable form of death. The novel’s comedy comes from the world of the ultra-rich (Riviera casinos, Parisian salons, country houses) rendered with precise satirical intelligence; its seriousness comes from Isabelle’s struggle to reconcile her rational self-interest with her emotional needs — to be, simultaneously, a thinking reed and a feeling one.
The novel was written between The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) — at the peak of West’s fictional powers, before political journalism consumed most of her energy. It deserves to be far better known: a novel of ideas that is also genuinely entertaining, a study of money and power that is also a comedy of manners.
Collecting The Thinking Reed
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1936; Viking, New York, 1936): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Viking first US edition in dust jacket: $50–$120
- Macmillan first UK edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $10–$20
- Virago Modern Classics reprint: $5–$12
West’s most purely entertaining novel. Its Virago reissue introduced it to a new feminist readership, and values for first editions have risen accordingly.