Our reading will be the British writer Rebecca West’s early novel/novella The Return of the Soldier (1918).  West, who lived a long, full, and rather remarkable life (1892-1983), was a novelist, journalist, essayist, and biographer. Having established a wide literary reputation in both fiction and non-fiction during the 1920s and ’30s, in 1945 she began writing for The New Yorker.  As a journalist during the post-war years she reported on the Nuremberg war crimes trials, McCarthyism in America, the Berlin Blockade, a lynching trial in South Carolina, the spy case of Alger Hiss, South Africa under apartheid, and the Profumo Affair in Britain. (Harry Truman called her “the world’s best reporter.”)  At the end of World War II West published a book on the war entitled The Meaning of Treason.  Perhaps her most acclaimed book is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941). She also wrote a study of St. Augustine and his influence (1933).

 

The Return of the Soldier, West’s first novel, is about Chris Baldry, an officer in the British Army during World War I who is a victim of shell-shock in battle in 1916.  Physically undamaged, he suffers from amnesia, unable to remember anything that has happened in the past fifteen years. He comes home to his wife Kitty and his cousin and childhood companion Jenny, who is the narrator. The other woman in his life is Margaret, the love of his younger years who reappears in his life.

 

The Return of the Soldier is available in several paperback editions, and in a pdf format.  In my paperback copy it’s about 70 pages long. Happy reading!