The Return of the Soldier
by Rebecca West
On This Page
Description
When Captain Chris Baldry, a World War I soldier, is sent home with a severe case of shellshock amnesia, he is a stranger to his wife, Kitty, and his adoring cousin, Jenny. Recoiling from the horrors of war and disillusioned with years of superficial married life, his mind has regressed fifteen years, where his heart may take refuge once again in the magic circle of his youth and of his first love, Margaret Allington.In this lyrical and poignant story of a wounded man and the three show more concerned women who seek to heal him, Rebecca West explores the complexity of the mind and its subtle strategies for coping with life's painful realities. Only when Chris has the courage to face one pivotal moment of truth in his married life will he be able to awaken from his boyish fantasy and become, indeed, "every inch a soldier."
. Literature. Fiction. show less
Tags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
Member Reviews
It's probably a disservice to Rebecca West to read her work as part of an investigation into the life of H. G. Wells. Still, reading about her relationship with Wells made me want to find out what she was like as a writer, as I have never read any of her work, so I picked up The Return of the Soldier, the most popular of her books published during their relationship. (Though I am also curious about The Judge based on Wells's account of its composition in H. G. Wells in Love, and a friend recommended Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) Like Catherine Wells, West's literary interests are very different from those of her lover, though I was amused when a "Bert Wells" rated a brief mention. (Seemingly no connection beyond the name, though.)
I knew show more The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex. show less
I knew show more The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex. show less
While The Return of the Soldier was Rebecca West's first novel, two years earlier, in 1916, she had published a study of Henry James. Armed with this knowledge, it is hard not to see James's fingerprints all over The Return of the Soldier. West does not, thankfully, emulate his convoluted style, but she does borrow James's brilliantly elaborate examinations of a complex moral dilemma. As such, West's novel bears a striking similarity to James's late works, in particular [b:The Wings of the Dove|840693|The Wings of the Dove|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333171879l/840693._SY75_.jpg|121908] and [b:The Golden Bowl|259020|The Golden Bowl|Henry show more James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386921801l/259020._SX50_.jpg|118576].
The novel is narrated in first person by Jenny Baldry, the cousin of the protagonist, Chris Baldry. Clearly Jenny has deeper feelings for her cousin than she is willing to admit, and West's ability to use her narrator to observe and imagine is both breathtaking and subtle. This artistic decision is what elevates the novel into greatness, for Jenny's subjectivity and lyricism add a patina to the story that is simply perfect.
The story opens in 1916, when Jenny finds Kitty, Chris's beautiful, rich, but rather cold wife, in the nursery. The nursery is now a kind of museum to Kitty and Chris's dead son, Oliver, who, five years earlier, had died at the young age of two. Jenny looks out over the garden of Baldry Court and remembers the day when Chris went off to war. She recalls, in particular, that he had always had a naive belief that things work out well, a side that had been suppressed by his growing adult responsibilities: his inheritance of his father's business fifteen years earlier, his marriage to Kitty, and the death of his son. The two women are told that a visitor has come to see them, Margaret Grey, a shabby and plain woman who claims to have news that Chris has suffered from shell-shock. At first, the woman don't believe her, thinking it is a scheme to swindle money from them, but after Margaret produces a telegram, sent to Margaret's former home at Monkey Island, they change their minds.
The next morning, a letter arrives from Frank Baldry, another of Chris's cousins. Frank confirms that Chris has shell-shock, as well as amnesia that means he cannot remember any of the last 15 years, including his wife and dead child. A week later, Chris returns home, but his interactions with his wife and the once-familiar house are awkward. Eventually, he insists on seeing Margaret, a woman he had been in love with 15 years earlier. Kitty, believing that her beauty and wealth are no match for the frumpy Margaret, permits it. Jenny reassures Chris that Kitty really is his wife and his life with her is real. Chris, in turn, tells her that his love from Monkey Island was also real.
Jenny then tells the story of the two lovers on the island, as she reconstructs it from Chris's account. In a memorable scene, Margaret peers in through her own window and imagines not knowing about Chris's love.
From the rich town of Harrowweald, Jenny heads over to nearby Wealdstone, a poor, working-class place marked by industry, in order to fetch Margaret. On her way, Jenny see Chris boating as though he had returned to his boyhood. Jenny finds Margaret's miserable house, Mariposa (Spanish for "butterfly"), and meets her bumbling husband, William Grey. Jenny hears Margaret's side of the original affair, and learns that the two had a falling out when Chris mistook her friendship with another man. After Chris's departure and the death of Margaret's father, she left Monkey Island, with instructions to forward her mail. When she visits years later, the new owner gives her some letters from Chris that she never received, but it is too late: she had already married William. Margaret is increasingly convinced that Margaret is some kind of saint. The two women watch from the nursery window as Margaret and Chris run toward each other and embrace.
Kitty employs Dr. Gilbert Anderson, a psychoanalyst, to try and cure Chris of his amnesia. However, Jenny increasingly believes that Margaret is some kind of mystical blessing that has saved Chris, even though it has come at the expense of his connection to Kitty and Jenny. Jenny finds the two lovers in the woods, with Chris sleeping in Margaret's arms. She tells them about the doctor coming that afternoon.
Dr. Anderson talks with Chris, and concludes that the regression has occurred because, in his former life, he had unconsciously been deeply unhappy. Meanwhile, Margaret learns about Oliver, and reveals that she, too, had a son named Dick whose circumstances mirror those of Chris's son. She suggests that confronting Chris with the memory of Oliver would cure his amnesia. Jenny takes Margaret to the nursery and both women hesitate over whether they should bring Chris back: would it not be better for him to remain in his state of enchantment? Eventually they decide that facing up to reality is the more difficult but rewarding path, and so Margaret goes to show Chris his son's belongings. The strategy works: Chris walks back to the house with the air of a man and a soldier.
There is a provocative ambivalence to West's ending for, like in the aforementioned works by James, there is no satisfaction to be derived from what appears, by all conventions, to be a "desirable" ending. The inheritance of Milly Theale's money (in The Wings of the Dove) or the smashing of the golden bowl provide no resolution, except insofar as they delineate and harden the impossible paradoxes of the unhappy situations that gave rise to them in the first place.
The return of the soldier, the restoration of Chris Baldry's memory, is a brilliant repudiation of romantic and mystical ideas in their many forms - religious, sexual, social, and most of all, nationalistic. In a similar vein to D.H. Lawrence, but more incisively, West refutes the idealization of England as a country of pastoral idylls and rustic beauty.
The war is a symptom of England's underlying illness, an unacknowledged unhappiness that has repeatedly caused it to suppress reality in favor of an idealized past to which it insists on returning. In this respect, West's novel is not only brutally insightful about her own period, but the century or so that has passed since. England continues to live in a delusion of its past grandeur, against all evidence that such a time has passed, and while Chris finds his own bitter "cure" at the novel's end, I don't see this repeated cycle of regression ending any time soon. show less
The novel is narrated in first person by Jenny Baldry, the cousin of the protagonist, Chris Baldry. Clearly Jenny has deeper feelings for her cousin than she is willing to admit, and West's ability to use her narrator to observe and imagine is both breathtaking and subtle. This artistic decision is what elevates the novel into greatness, for Jenny's subjectivity and lyricism add a patina to the story that is simply perfect.
The story opens in 1916, when Jenny finds Kitty, Chris's beautiful, rich, but rather cold wife, in the nursery. The nursery is now a kind of museum to Kitty and Chris's dead son, Oliver, who, five years earlier, had died at the young age of two. Jenny looks out over the garden of Baldry Court and remembers the day when Chris went off to war. She recalls, in particular, that he had always had a naive belief that things work out well, a side that had been suppressed by his growing adult responsibilities: his inheritance of his father's business fifteen years earlier, his marriage to Kitty, and the death of his son. The two women are told that a visitor has come to see them, Margaret Grey, a shabby and plain woman who claims to have news that Chris has suffered from shell-shock. At first, the woman don't believe her, thinking it is a scheme to swindle money from them, but after Margaret produces a telegram, sent to Margaret's former home at Monkey Island, they change their minds.
The next morning, a letter arrives from Frank Baldry, another of Chris's cousins. Frank confirms that Chris has shell-shock, as well as amnesia that means he cannot remember any of the last 15 years, including his wife and dead child. A week later, Chris returns home, but his interactions with his wife and the once-familiar house are awkward. Eventually, he insists on seeing Margaret, a woman he had been in love with 15 years earlier. Kitty, believing that her beauty and wealth are no match for the frumpy Margaret, permits it. Jenny reassures Chris that Kitty really is his wife and his life with her is real. Chris, in turn, tells her that his love from Monkey Island was also real.
Jenny then tells the story of the two lovers on the island, as she reconstructs it from Chris's account. In a memorable scene, Margaret peers in through her own window and imagines not knowing about Chris's love.
From the rich town of Harrowweald, Jenny heads over to nearby Wealdstone, a poor, working-class place marked by industry, in order to fetch Margaret. On her way, Jenny see Chris boating as though he had returned to his boyhood. Jenny finds Margaret's miserable house, Mariposa (Spanish for "butterfly"), and meets her bumbling husband, William Grey. Jenny hears Margaret's side of the original affair, and learns that the two had a falling out when Chris mistook her friendship with another man. After Chris's departure and the death of Margaret's father, she left Monkey Island, with instructions to forward her mail. When she visits years later, the new owner gives her some letters from Chris that she never received, but it is too late: she had already married William. Margaret is increasingly convinced that Margaret is some kind of saint. The two women watch from the nursery window as Margaret and Chris run toward each other and embrace.
Kitty employs Dr. Gilbert Anderson, a psychoanalyst, to try and cure Chris of his amnesia. However, Jenny increasingly believes that Margaret is some kind of mystical blessing that has saved Chris, even though it has come at the expense of his connection to Kitty and Jenny. Jenny finds the two lovers in the woods, with Chris sleeping in Margaret's arms. She tells them about the doctor coming that afternoon.
Dr. Anderson talks with Chris, and concludes that the regression has occurred because, in his former life, he had unconsciously been deeply unhappy. Meanwhile, Margaret learns about Oliver, and reveals that she, too, had a son named Dick whose circumstances mirror those of Chris's son. She suggests that confronting Chris with the memory of Oliver would cure his amnesia. Jenny takes Margaret to the nursery and both women hesitate over whether they should bring Chris back: would it not be better for him to remain in his state of enchantment? Eventually they decide that facing up to reality is the more difficult but rewarding path, and so Margaret goes to show Chris his son's belongings. The strategy works: Chris walks back to the house with the air of a man and a soldier.
There is a provocative ambivalence to West's ending for, like in the aforementioned works by James, there is no satisfaction to be derived from what appears, by all conventions, to be a "desirable" ending. The inheritance of Milly Theale's money (in The Wings of the Dove) or the smashing of the golden bowl provide no resolution, except insofar as they delineate and harden the impossible paradoxes of the unhappy situations that gave rise to them in the first place.
The return of the soldier, the restoration of Chris Baldry's memory, is a brilliant repudiation of romantic and mystical ideas in their many forms - religious, sexual, social, and most of all, nationalistic. In a similar vein to D.H. Lawrence, but more incisively, West refutes the idealization of England as a country of pastoral idylls and rustic beauty.
The war is a symptom of England's underlying illness, an unacknowledged unhappiness that has repeatedly caused it to suppress reality in favor of an idealized past to which it insists on returning. In this respect, West's novel is not only brutally insightful about her own period, but the century or so that has passed since. England continues to live in a delusion of its past grandeur, against all evidence that such a time has passed, and while Chris finds his own bitter "cure" at the novel's end, I don't see this repeated cycle of regression ending any time soon. show less
Wow. Such a small novel to pack such a wallop, from beginning to end.
This is my first West book and was also the first she published. At 24! I'm dumbfounded by that.
Most reviewers have mentioned the lyricism of her writing, and it's true. However, the sentence structure -- often very long sentences -- I found an effort to follow; more commas would have helped this lazy reader. Is this the way West always writes, I wondered. Is it some sort of Edwardian thing? Now I see the structure (and the reward for my dogged efforts to re-read the same sentence multiple times) was integral to the tale she was telling: a kind of stream of consciousness with the deliberate building of the private observations by the narrator, Jenny, until the brutal show more insights and impressions were rolled in that astute lyricism making you jolt at the often cruel meaning. And, paradoxically, the cruelty was the precise thing to invoke reader's compassion too. Jenny's astute description of the other two woman not only told us accurately about their lives and roles, but also unintentionally a brutal insight about herself and the precariousness of her own life.
The three women are stuck in an awful time in history (during WW I), firmly stuck within their restrictive roles, lives firmly defined by their relationship to men. Not one is to be envied by present day readers, nor even hated, although Kitty does appear the least sympathetic. One could, actually, make the case that Kitty deserves our sympathy most. She is the most stuck in her pre-defined life without any escape except down. And her life was not unfolding at all as it should. Shallow Kitty was also lacking the depth of heart to begin to understand the changes happening to her life or how to adapt to those changes. She is stuck in her suffering.
I'm especially glad I read the novel itself before the included 1997 Introduction by Samuel Hynes, the order which I normally do anyway. A "cold read" absolutely allowed The Return of the Soldier to play out every bit of talent and power it has rights to claim.
Rebecca West, I need to read more of your works. You were amazing. At 24! show less
This is my first West book and was also the first she published. At 24! I'm dumbfounded by that.
Most reviewers have mentioned the lyricism of her writing, and it's true. However, the sentence structure -- often very long sentences -- I found an effort to follow; more commas would have helped this lazy reader. Is this the way West always writes, I wondered. Is it some sort of Edwardian thing? Now I see the structure (and the reward for my dogged efforts to re-read the same sentence multiple times) was integral to the tale she was telling: a kind of stream of consciousness with the deliberate building of the private observations by the narrator, Jenny, until the brutal show more insights and impressions were rolled in that astute lyricism making you jolt at the often cruel meaning. And, paradoxically, the cruelty was the precise thing to invoke reader's compassion too. Jenny's astute description of the other two woman not only told us accurately about their lives and roles, but also unintentionally a brutal insight about herself and the precariousness of her own life.
The three women are stuck in an awful time in history (during WW I), firmly stuck within their restrictive roles, lives firmly defined by their relationship to men. Not one is to be envied by present day readers, nor even hated, although Kitty does appear the least sympathetic. One could, actually, make the case that Kitty deserves our sympathy most. She is the most stuck in her pre-defined life without any escape except down. And her life was not unfolding at all as it should. Shallow Kitty was also lacking the depth of heart to begin to understand the changes happening to her life or how to adapt to those changes. She is stuck in her suffering.
I'm especially glad I read the novel itself before the included 1997 Introduction by Samuel Hynes, the order which I normally do anyway. A "cold read" absolutely allowed The Return of the Soldier to play out every bit of talent and power it has rights to claim.
Rebecca West, I need to read more of your works. You were amazing. At 24! show less
A rare First World War novella told entirely from the home front, through the eyes of three women – a wife, a cousin and a first love – each losing Chris in a different way. I found the dense modernist prose slow going at times but ultimately rewarding. West closes on a single image that quietly reframes the preceding events, leaving me haunted by the cure.
Wanda McCaddon, narrating this novel, perfectly captured the atmosphere of Edwardian England.
What really stood out is its subtle point of view of the war’s impact on one family’s relationships. There were moments I was thinking about J B Priestley’s stage play An Inspector Calls, but here the detective work is replaced with psychology.
The entire story is told from one person’s view, Jenny, and through her we start to see social class discrimination when the value of marriage, love and happiness are bought to light.
Chris, married to Kitty, returns from war with no memory of the last 15 years. He is bewildered to find he is married, older and the woman he thought he loved was a past love. The story ends leaving the question open show more of Chris’s happiness.
Rebecca West published this in 1918 – the year World War I ends – here, the war is a backdrop whist showing the conflict between duty and honour and being true to oneself. The power of this conundrum is not lost by the novel’s short length. show less
What really stood out is its subtle point of view of the war’s impact on one family’s relationships. There were moments I was thinking about J B Priestley’s stage play An Inspector Calls, but here the detective work is replaced with psychology.
The entire story is told from one person’s view, Jenny, and through her we start to see social class discrimination when the value of marriage, love and happiness are bought to light.
Chris, married to Kitty, returns from war with no memory of the last 15 years. He is bewildered to find he is married, older and the woman he thought he loved was a past love. The story ends leaving the question open show more of Chris’s happiness.
Rebecca West published this in 1918 – the year World War I ends – here, the war is a backdrop whist showing the conflict between duty and honour and being true to oneself. The power of this conundrum is not lost by the novel’s short length. show less
How could you not enjoy a book that includes the idea of:
“An over-confiding explanation made by a shabby visitor while using the door-mat almost too zealously”?
PLOT
In this slim novel set during WW1, Charles and Kitty live in tasteful opulence, along with his cousin Jenny, who tells the story of Charles' memory loss. He returns to England with no memory of the last 15 years, desperate to see his youthful (and lower class) love, Margaret, who is also now married to someone else.
The story is really about the three women, their relationship with Charles, each other and their attitude to his condition. Can and should they persuade him of the truth, when he seems so happy as he is?
It is enhanced by some significant, and no doubt show more deliberate, omissions. In particular, we never know the content of some letters and Jenny is not privy to all that passes between Charles and Margaret when he returns.
LYRICAL LANGUAGE
Sections of it read more like poetry:
“The dusk flowed in wet and cool... as if to put out the fire of confusion... and the furniture, very visible through the soft evening opacity with the observant brightness of old well-polished wood, seemed terribly aware. Strangeness had come into the house and everything was appalled by it, even time.”
There are dark but insightful asides:
“The desolate merriment of an inattentively played pianola") and dark themes.”
MEMORY LOSS
The pain of confusion caused by memory loss is the most obvious:
“"All the inhabitants of this new tract of time were his enemies, all its circumstances his prison bars" and "his loss of memory was a triumph over the limitation of language which prevents the mass of men making explicit statement about their spiritual relationships.”
More strangely, Jenny idolises Charles far too much for a platonic cousin, though oddly, it doesn't seem to cause any friction. She talks of her "frenzied love", his "amazing goodness", "our task of refreshing him" and "passion for Chris was our point of honour".
CLASS
There are nasty attitudes to the lower middle classes. Jenny finds Margaret physically repellent, though she tries to be outwardly polite. In her narration, she mentions the "squalor" of Margaret's home (though Margaret can afford a part-time maid), that she is "not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty" and that "it would have been such agony to the finger tips to touch any part of her apparel".
In contrast, Charles' ancestral home was:
“A vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent.”
Despite, or more probably because of her more humble background, Margaret sees through this brittle and selfish beauty to reveal the burden of wealth:
“It's a big place. How poor Chris must have worked to keep it up.”
Jenny's unspoken response is that:
“It had been our pretence that by... organising a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But she revealed the truth.”
I doubt modern readers will have much fondness for Kitty or Jenny, but it is a poignant and excellently written book.
SEE ALSO
• Janet Lewis' The Wife of Martin Guerre which I reviewed 3*, HERE.
• The Return of Martin Guerre - non-fiction that inspired Janet Lewis. show less
“An over-confiding explanation made by a shabby visitor while using the door-mat almost too zealously”?
PLOT
In this slim novel set during WW1, Charles and Kitty live in tasteful opulence, along with his cousin Jenny, who tells the story of Charles' memory loss. He returns to England with no memory of the last 15 years, desperate to see his youthful (and lower class) love, Margaret, who is also now married to someone else.
The story is really about the three women, their relationship with Charles, each other and their attitude to his condition. Can and should they persuade him of the truth, when he seems so happy as he is?
It is enhanced by some significant, and no doubt show more deliberate, omissions. In particular, we never know the content of some letters and Jenny is not privy to all that passes between Charles and Margaret when he returns.
LYRICAL LANGUAGE
Sections of it read more like poetry:
“The dusk flowed in wet and cool... as if to put out the fire of confusion... and the furniture, very visible through the soft evening opacity with the observant brightness of old well-polished wood, seemed terribly aware. Strangeness had come into the house and everything was appalled by it, even time.”
There are dark but insightful asides:
“The desolate merriment of an inattentively played pianola") and dark themes.”
MEMORY LOSS
The pain of confusion caused by memory loss is the most obvious:
“"All the inhabitants of this new tract of time were his enemies, all its circumstances his prison bars" and "his loss of memory was a triumph over the limitation of language which prevents the mass of men making explicit statement about their spiritual relationships.”
More strangely, Jenny idolises Charles far too much for a platonic cousin, though oddly, it doesn't seem to cause any friction. She talks of her "frenzied love", his "amazing goodness", "our task of refreshing him" and "passion for Chris was our point of honour".
CLASS
There are nasty attitudes to the lower middle classes. Jenny finds Margaret physically repellent, though she tries to be outwardly polite. In her narration, she mentions the "squalor" of Margaret's home (though Margaret can afford a part-time maid), that she is "not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty" and that "it would have been such agony to the finger tips to touch any part of her apparel".
In contrast, Charles' ancestral home was:
“A vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent.”
Despite, or more probably because of her more humble background, Margaret sees through this brittle and selfish beauty to reveal the burden of wealth:
“It's a big place. How poor Chris must have worked to keep it up.”
Jenny's unspoken response is that:
“It had been our pretence that by... organising a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But she revealed the truth.”
I doubt modern readers will have much fondness for Kitty or Jenny, but it is a poignant and excellently written book.
SEE ALSO
• Janet Lewis' The Wife of Martin Guerre which I reviewed 3*, HERE.
• The Return of Martin Guerre - non-fiction that inspired Janet Lewis. show less
First published in 1918 when Rebecca West was a mere 24, this book tells the story of a young English officer who returns home from the WWI trenches suffering from shell shock unable to remember anything from the last 15 years including his wife and the loss of his only child.
Chris Baldry returns to his family’s estate to find his beautiful but cool wife Kitty and his cousin, Jenny, who have transformed his home in his absence. Chris can’t deal with the changes and wants to hide in a happier, more carefree part of his life. When Chris insists on seeing Margaret, his first love, Kitty becomes cold and withdrawn. All three women have a choice: to leave him as he is or to 'cure' him.
The story is told from Jenny's viewpoint and it is show more quickly apparent that she loves Chris very deeply and always has but also knows that it will never be reciprocated which gives her an insight into what she will never have. It is this passion and lack of reciprocation which makes Jenny an excellent foil for what is to come.
Despite being written at the end of WWI the war is hardly mentioned, no one knows what horrors Chris has seen because even he can't remember them. Yet there is a certain anger in the author's writing. What is far more important to this tale is the idea of what is absent and what is present, the presence of Chris and the absence of his memory, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehoods, money and the lack of it but perhaps the most important loss is that of a child which we learn about on the opening page. Chris has blocked this memory out but it is its remembrance that will bring back his sanity.
Jenny acknowledges Kitty’s shallowness, but even she is guilty of class discrimination, constantly describing Margaret’s shabby appearance as “offensive” but she along with Margaret must struggle between helping Chris remember his wife and keeping him in his present emotional state, a choice that they ultimately reject.
Despite being such a short book, my copy is only 148 pages, there are plenty of long depictions of the house and the estate. Beauty and good taste are initially seen as essential but as the story evolves this is seen as false and brittle.
In this book the author tries to encapsulate many aspects of the day, the war, shell shock, women left at home and class differences to name a few, but I also felt that it wasn't without its faults. Despite its brevity some of the descriptions I found overly long with some paragraphs lasting a page or more, the fact that the story was told in the first person, from Jenny's point of view, meant that the other characters lacked a certain depth. This was particularly true of Chris who barely features. In particular I would have liked to have learnt a little more about him before the war began and after his father's death. Sometimes this made me feel that I had to put too much effort into reading between the lines. I also felt that the ending, with today's knowledge of mental illness, a little abrupt, simplistic and not terribly believable. In short I would have been happier if the book was longer (not something I often say).
However, that said and done given that this was written when the author was at such a tender age and that this was her first published novel it is a remarkable piece of work and deserves to be more widely read. show less
Chris Baldry returns to his family’s estate to find his beautiful but cool wife Kitty and his cousin, Jenny, who have transformed his home in his absence. Chris can’t deal with the changes and wants to hide in a happier, more carefree part of his life. When Chris insists on seeing Margaret, his first love, Kitty becomes cold and withdrawn. All three women have a choice: to leave him as he is or to 'cure' him.
The story is told from Jenny's viewpoint and it is show more quickly apparent that she loves Chris very deeply and always has but also knows that it will never be reciprocated which gives her an insight into what she will never have. It is this passion and lack of reciprocation which makes Jenny an excellent foil for what is to come.
Despite being written at the end of WWI the war is hardly mentioned, no one knows what horrors Chris has seen because even he can't remember them. Yet there is a certain anger in the author's writing. What is far more important to this tale is the idea of what is absent and what is present, the presence of Chris and the absence of his memory, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehoods, money and the lack of it but perhaps the most important loss is that of a child which we learn about on the opening page. Chris has blocked this memory out but it is its remembrance that will bring back his sanity.
Jenny acknowledges Kitty’s shallowness, but even she is guilty of class discrimination, constantly describing Margaret’s shabby appearance as “offensive” but she along with Margaret must struggle between helping Chris remember his wife and keeping him in his present emotional state, a choice that they ultimately reject.
Despite being such a short book, my copy is only 148 pages, there are plenty of long depictions of the house and the estate. Beauty and good taste are initially seen as essential but as the story evolves this is seen as false and brittle.
In this book the author tries to encapsulate many aspects of the day, the war, shell shock, women left at home and class differences to name a few, but I also felt that it wasn't without its faults. Despite its brevity some of the descriptions I found overly long with some paragraphs lasting a page or more, the fact that the story was told in the first person, from Jenny's point of view, meant that the other characters lacked a certain depth. This was particularly true of Chris who barely features. In particular I would have liked to have learnt a little more about him before the war began and after his father's death. Sometimes this made me feel that I had to put too much effort into reading between the lines. I also felt that the ending, with today's knowledge of mental illness, a little abrupt, simplistic and not terribly believable. In short I would have been happier if the book was longer (not something I often say).
However, that said and done given that this was written when the author was at such a tender age and that this was her first published novel it is a remarkable piece of work and deserves to be more widely read. show less
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
ThingScore 50
Though its style is occasionally a trifle strained, a trifle "Precious," the novel is on the whole, well written, and its plot well handled.
added by christiguc
Lists
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
1,448 works; 1,131 members
The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read
1,005 works; 546 members
Favourite Virago Modern Classics
183 works; 38 members
Women in War
148 works; 29 members
1910s
90 works; 16 members
20th Century Literature
1,161 works; 55 members
Best Love Stories
107 works; 14 members
Backlisted
109 works; 9 members
Best Downton Abbey-esqe books to read
17 works; 7 members
World War I Fiction
94 works; 15 members
Short and Sweet
242 works; 23 members
Books about World War I
80 works; 14 members
Books Read in 2014
2,341 works; 86 members
1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus
723 works; 27 members
World War I books
32 works; 8 members
First Novels
373 works; 17 members
Undiscovered Classics to Read
70 works; 15 members
Books Read in 2022
5,164 works; 113 members
THE WAR ROOM
813 works; 24 members
Books referenced in A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39
199 works; 6 members
Books Read in 2019
4,052 works; 108 members
War Literature
101 works; 19 members
Canon de la narrativa universal del s. XX (cicutadry)
499 works; 3 members
Author Information
48+ Works 8,578 Members
Taking her name from one of Henrik Ibsen's strong-minded women, Rebecca West was a politically and socially active feminist all her long life. She had an intense 10-year affair with H.G. Wells, with whom she had a son. A brilliant and versatile novelist, critic, essayist, and political commentator, West's greatest literary achievement is perhaps show more her travel diary, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1942). Five years in the writing, it is the story of an Easter trip that she and her husband, British banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (whom she had married in 1930), made through Yugoslavia in 1937. A historical narrative with excellent reporting, it is essentially an analysis of Western culture. During World War II, she superintended British broadcast talks to Yugoslavia. Her remarkable reports of the treason trials of Lord Haw and John Amery appeared first in the New Yorker and are included with other stories about traitors in The Meaning of Treason (1947), which was expanded to deal with traitors and defectors since World War II as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The Birds Fall Down (1966), which was a bestseller, is the story of a young Englishwoman caught in the grip of Russian terrorists. From a true story told to her more than half a century ago by the sister of Ford Madox Ford (who had heard it from her Russian husband), West "created a rich and instructive spy thriller, which contains an immense amount of brilliantly distributed information about the ideologies of the time, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the conflicts of customs, belief, and temperament between Russians and Western Europeans, the techniques of espionage and counter-espionage, and the life of exiles in Paris" (New Yorker). Unlike that of her more famous contemporaries, her fiction is stylistically and structurally conventional, but it effectively details the evolution of daily life amid the backdrop of such historical disasters as the world wars. Her critical works include Arnold Bennett Himself, Henry James (1916), Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, and The Court and the Castle (1957), a study of political and religious ideas in imaginative literature. In 1949, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Notable Lists
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Il ritorno del soldato
- Original title
- The Return of the Soldier
- Original publication date
- 1918
- People/Characters
- Christopher Baldry; Kitty Baldry; Jenny Baldry; Margaret West (nee Allington)
- Important places
- Monkey Island, Bray, Berkshire, England, UK; England, UK; Harrow Weald, London, England, UK
- Important events
- World War I
- Related movies
- The Return of the Soldier (1982 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- To
J - First words
- 'Ah, don't begin to fuss!' wailed Kitty; 'if a woman began to worry in these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight -- !'
- Quotations
- We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Marga... (show all)ret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.
...how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to lovers innumerable things do not matter.
"I don't know anybody in Wealdstone." That is the name of the red suburban stain which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrowweald.
All her life long Margaret, who in her time had partaken of the inalienable dignity of a requited love, had lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)'He's cured!' she whispered slowly. 'He's cured!'
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 1,711
- Popularity
- 12,869
- Reviews
- 81
- Rating
- (3.91)
- Languages
- 8 — Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 94
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 27