The Return of the Soldier

"A major literary event." -Carl Rollyson

The Return of the Soldier tells the story of a shell-shocked soldier who returns home from the First World War believing that he is in love with a working-class woman from his past, rather than married to his aristocratic wife. His family and doctor must decide whether to allow him to remain safely in his delusion, or to bring him back to reality and return him to the front. A brief novel with a seemingly simple plot, it is a classic of modernist literature and provides a point of entry into discussions of some of the twentieth century's most enduring themes.

In 1916 on an isolated country estate just outside London, Captain Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers only as a childhood friend, and the poor innkeeper's daughter he once courted leave Chris to languish in a safe, dreamy past--or will they help him recover his memory so that he can return to the front? The answer is revealed through a heart-wrenching, unexpected sacrifice.

Dame Rebecca West (1892–1983) is one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists, journalists, and literary critics of the twentieth century. Uniquely wide-ranging in subject matter and breathtakingly intelligent in her ability to take on the oldest and knottiest problems of human relations, West was a thoroughly entertaining public intellectual. In her eleven novels, beginning with The Return of the Soldier, she explored topics including feminism, socialism, love, betrayal, and identity. West’s prolific journalistic works include her coverage of the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker, published as A Train of Powder, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic study of Yugoslavia. She had a son with H.G. Wells, and later married banker Henry Maxwell Andrews, continuing to write, and publish, until she died in London at age ninety.