Reasonably enough I suppose, much of the media coverage surrounding the forthcoming Vorticist exhibition at the Tate has focused on the painters and sculptors associated with the group. Ezra Pound gets the odd honourable mention as propagandist in chief, and Wyndham Lewis's career as a novelist can't be entirely ignored, but in general the literary aspect of the Great English Vortex has tended to be overlooked.

Among the writers to appear in the pages of the group's journal, Blast, was Rebecca West, whose first published fiction, a short story called Indissoluble Matrimony, appeared in the first issue. Although only 22, West had already begun to establish herself in London avant-garde literary circles thanks to her work for the widely-read feminist paper The Freewoman. In fact, she published her first article 100 years ago, in 1911, the year when Vorticism's older sister Imagism was born.

In that first article, a review of a long-forgotten book called The Position of Women in Indian Life by the Marahini of Baroda, the characteristic themes and tone of West's early work are already evident. Much of this early writing, including the Blast story, is collected in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 and it is well worth reading.

The teenage West already displays a precocious ability to conjure up succinct put-downs. Of the great novelist of the day: "It is at present the custom of fools to decry Mr Arnold Bennet's work as 'photographic'. Now photography is an adult recreation, and Mr Bennet is the child among the authors of today." Of the earnest author of a work on Morals: " ... when a socialist takes to being dull, he is much duller than anyone else.". And of housework: " ... domestic slavery, to be shunned like rat-poison." All this in the pages of a journal with a reputation so scandalous that her family had forbidden her to read, never mind work for, it. Consequently, that first article was the only one published under her own name, Cicily Fairfield.

She and Pound worked together on The Freewoman's successor, The Exile, and so when he and Lewis were looking for writers to contribute to their blast against polite English culture, she must have seemed a natural ally. Certainly, Indissoluble Matrimony does not disappoint; it is, for its time, an extraordinarily subversive story that sets out to turn the Victorian and Edwardian gender roles with which both author and readers would have grown up on their heads.

It's the story of a man of an essentially celibate cast of mind who finds himself unhappily married to a woman who, much to his disgust, has a deeply sensuous nature and undisguised physical appetites. He follows her onto the moor one night in an attempt to catch her in the arms of the lover he has imagined for her and when he discovers that her intention is nothing more than an innocent midnight swim, he holds her head under the water until he believes her to be dead. It's easy to imagine that a contemporary audience would have found the calm frankness of the story if anything more shocking than Lewis's Vorticist designs.

Indissoluble Matrimony was the sum total of West's involvement with the Vorticists; she wasn't one of nature's joiners. Equally, she was a writer whose interests and concerns ranged too widely to be contained in a single genre; through a career that lasted 70 years she jumped around between journalism, polemics, travel writing and fiction but always built on that distinctive voice she began to discover as an 18-year-old a century ago.

While her reputation now rests primarily on two books, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Meaning of Treason, her early work is a joy in itself, bringing to life, as it does, the artistic and intellectual melting pot that was London leading up to and during the first world war. Here's hoping that the Tate show may encourage a new generation of readers to rediscover the young Rebecca for themselves.