The Return of the Soldier
by Rebecca West
Summary
Captain Chris Baldry returns from the trenches of the Western Front shell shocked and missing fifteen years of memory, believing himself still a young man in love with Margaret, an innkeeper's daughter he courted long before his marriage. West narrates the story through Chris's cousin Jenny, who watches his wife Kitty and Margaret, now married herself and much changed by years of poverty, negotiate which version of Chris each woman is willing to accept back. Kitty wants her polished, socially acceptable husband restored regardless of what it costs him; Margaret, though she still loves the man Chris believes himself to be, comes to see that his amnesia is protecting him from a grief his conscious mind cannot yet survive, the death of the young son he and Kitty lost years earlier. Margaret is ultimately the one who ends the delusion, deliberately confronting Chris with proof of his son's death, and the shock restores his adult memory in full. The novel closes with Chris cured in the clinical sense, but Jenny and Margaret both understand exactly what that cure actually returns him to, his real marriage, his grief, and eventually the war itself, and the book ends on that quiet, unresolved cost rather than on relief.
West tells the story with real economy for how much ground it covers, moving fast through a small cast and a handful of scenes to raise a genuinely uncomfortable question, whether curing a man of a happier delusion is a kindness at all when the truth waiting on the other side is a dead child and a return to combat. It reads briskly but leaves a reader turning over its ending long after the last page.
This was West's debut novel, and it stands among the first works of fiction to treat shell shock as a serious psychological subject rather than as a mark of cowardice, a treatment ahead of much medical opinion of its own moment.
Historical Context & Significance
West published one of the earliest serious literary treatments of shell shock while the war was still being fought, and as a British author she was outside the reach of the new Pulitzer for the novel; no British prize of comparable stature yet existed to recognize a short debut novel like this one. The Century Company published it in 1918, and the critic Lawrence Gilman, writing in the North American Review that May, called it an authentic masterpiece, praising West's realist detail and her ability to handle a wartime romance without slipping into sentimentality.
West went on to write for another six decades as a journalist, critic, and novelist without ever receiving a major literary prize for her fiction. Critics dismissed the novel for much of the mid twentieth century as a minor work beside her later journalism, before a late twentieth century reassessment recovered its complexity around trauma and gender; it was adapted into a 1982 film starring Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Glenda Jackson, and Ian Holm.