The Return of the Soldier

by Rebecca West, Samuel Hynes (Introduction)

Overview

World War I, the backdrop of Rebecca West's first novel, was "the first war that women could imagine, as Samuel Hynes writes in his eloquent Introduction, "and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel". However, The Return of the Soldier (1918) takes place not on the battlefield but in an isolated country house. Narrated by a woman who, like West, has never experienced war and yet for whom the war is very real, it examines the relationships between three women and a soldier suffering from shell shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the choice between the romantic past and the horrifying present, between love and reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141180656
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/01/1998
Series:	Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Series
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.72(h) x 0.29(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rebecca West (1892–1983) was a novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic. She published eight novels in addition to her masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, for which she made several trips to the Balkans. Following World War II, West also published two books on the relation of the individual to the state, called The Meaning of Treason and A Train of Powder.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Return of the Soldier"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Rebecca West.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Rebecca West: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Return of the Soldier

Appendix A: Textual Variants

1. Opening Passage of The Return of the Soldier, from the American Edition, Century Co. (1918)
2. Letter by Cousin Frank, from the American Edition, Century Co. (1918)

Appendix B: World War I Poetry

1. Rupert Brooke
1. “The Soldier” (1914)
2. Jessie Pope
1. “The Call” (1915)
3. Madeline Ida Bedford
1. “Munition Wages” (1917)
4. Wilfred Owen
1. “Mental Cases” (1918, 1920)
2. “Disabled” (1917, 1920)
5. Siegfried Sassoon
1. “The Death Bed” (1918)
2. “Does It Matter?” (1918)
6. Amy Lowell
1. “September, 1918” (1919)
7. Guillaume Apollinaire
1. “April Night 1915 (for L. de C.-C.)” (1918)
2. “Platoon Commander” (1918)
8. Max Jacob
1. “1914” (1923)
2. “War” (1923)
9. T.S. Eliot
1. “Gerontion” (1920)
10. Ezra Pound
1. From “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920)
11. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
1. “8” (1916)
12. Marianne Moore
1. “Reinforcements” (1921)
2. “The Fish” (1921)

Appendix C: World War I Prose

1. D.H. Lawrence, “With the Guns” (1914)
2. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917)
3. Rebecca West, “Woman Worship: War, Peace and the Future by Ellen Key” (13 April 1917)
4. Rebecca West, “Hands That War: The Night Shift” (1916)
5. From Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929)

Appendix D: World War I Visual Art

1. Paintings
1. C.R.W. Nevinson, “A Bursting Shell” (1915)
2. Wyndham Lewis, “A Battery Shelled” (1919)
3. Paul Nash, “We Are Making a New World” (1918)
4. William Roberts, “A Shell Dump, France” (1918–19)
5. William Orpen, “Zonnebeke” (1918)
2. British World War I Propaganda Posters
1. “Take Up the Sword of Justice”
2. “Women of Britain Say—‘Go!’”
3. “Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps”
4. “Daddy, What Did YOU Do in the Great War?”
5. “The Greatest Mother in the World”
3. Norman Price’s Illustrations for the Century Co. Magazine Version of The Return of the Soldier (1918)
4. World War I Photography

Appendix E: W.H.R. Rivers, “The Repression of War Experience” (1918)

Appendix F: From Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Appendix G: Contemporary Reviews of The Return of the Soldier

1. Robert Lynd, “Miss Rebecca West’s Novel,” The Daily News (23 May 1918)
2. Lawrence Gilman, “Rebecca West,” The North American Review (May 1918)
3. “The Return of the Soldier,” The Independent (13 April 1918)
4. Q.K. [unidentified], “Rebecca West’s First Novel,” The New Republic (23 March 1918)
5. Henry B. Fuller, “Rebecca West—Novelist,” The Dial (28 March 1918)
6. Doris Webb, “‘Something Saner Than Sanity’: The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West,” The Publishers’ Weekly (16 February 1918)
7. “The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West,” The Scotsman (23 May 1918)
8. “The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West,” The New York Times (10 March 1918)
9. Rebecca West, “The Return of the Soldier,” The Observer (24 June 1928)

Select Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

<:st> Reprint of West's 1918 short novel of war, amnesia, manners. Cited in Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Brilliant . . . [West was] an artist who wrote wonderful prose, who took chances with language and cadence, and who wrote poetically, even of prosaic subjects.”
—The New Republic

From the Publisher

A unique poignant little piece of fiction…[West] develops a situation of remarkable power and fine emotional import in the searching light of which the handful of characters who make up this heart drama stand vividly forth.”

Bookseller

[West’s] strength of mind, her powers of observation, her complete grasp of the workings of the human mind in abnormal conditions, as illustrated in The Return of the Soldier, are gifts that are denied even writers of considerable reputation and popularity.”

Medicine and Surgery

In the same way that a fine actor can make Shakespeare’s verse sound spontaneous and natural, [McCaddon] gives West a voice that sounds familiar and unforced, allowing the poignancy and psychological sophistication of the story to be heard.”

AudioFile

For after The Return of the Soldier, there could be no doubt whatever that Rebecca West possesse[s] what had already partly revealed itself in her criticism—the supreme gift in literature, a creative imagination.”

New York Evening Post