The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of The First World War from the perspective of his female cousin Jenny. The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with trauma and it's effects on the family, and optimistically suggests that psychoanalysis might offer a simple cure to the trauma. Though initially reviewed by critics, literary scholars treating West's work tended to focus on her later novels dismissing The Return of... the Soldier until the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first.The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1982. The Return of the Soldier is Rebecca's West's first novel. It was published in 1918 during World War I and remained the only novel written and published by a woman during the war about the war. The novel begins as the narrator, Jenny, describes her cousin by marriage Kitty Baldry pining in the abandoned nursery where her dead first son would have been raised.
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| Author: | Rebecca West |
| Genre: | War novel, Psychological novel |
| Year published: | 1918 |
| Number of editions: | 12 |