The Return of the Soldier was published by Nisbet in London and Century in New York in 1918 — during the war it depicts. West was twenty-five, already famous as a journalist and critic (her essays in The Freewoman and The Clarion had established her as one of the most brilliant voices of the suffragist and socialist movements), and this short novel (barely 90 pages) announced a fictional talent of equal force.
Captain Chris Baldry returns from the Western Front with his memory erased back fifteen years: he believes he is twenty, unmarried, and in love with Margaret Allington — a woman of lower social class whom he courted before his marriage to the beautiful, cold Kitty. Margaret, now middle-aged and worn, comes to Baldry Court when Chris writes to her. The household — narrated by Chris’s cousin Jenny, who loves him silently — must decide what to do: keep Chris in his amnesiac happiness (where he is warm, loving, and alive) or “cure” him — restore his memory and return him to the elegant, empty marriage and the war that broke him.
The novel operates as a critique of everything the Edwardian upper class values: beauty, property, social position, duty. Kitty is beautiful and Chris’s rightful wife — but she is also incapable of warmth. Margaret is dowdy, poor, and technically irrelevant — but Chris loves her, and his love (however delusional) has made him human again in a way his “real” life never did. The cure, when it comes, is ambiguous: Chris regains his memory and with it his soldier’s bearing — but what he has regained is the capacity to die.
Collecting The Return of the Soldier
First edition (Nisbet, London, 1918): Cloth binding. No dust jacket issued (or extremely rare).
First US edition (Century, New York, 1918): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Nisbet first UK edition (without jacket, as issued): $200–$500
- Century first US edition in dust jacket: $150–$400
- Without jacket (US): $30–$60
- Virago Modern Classics reprint: $5–$12
One of the first novels about shell shock, published while the war was still being fought. Its feminist and psychological insights anticipate decades of subsequent literature on trauma.