by Rebecca West
Kitty and Jenny sit at home, awaiting the end of the war and the return of Chris, Kitty’s husband and Jenny’s cousin. However he returns to them sooner, suffering amnesia from shell-shock. He can remember Jenny and Margaret, his first love, but has no recollection of Kitty. Between the women they ha...
Lost chances and missed opportunities, resignation, change, war, suppression and oppression are among the themes surrounding West’s novel. For such a short novel, it is heavy. The heaviness is pervasive and there is no sense of reprieve for any of the characters. The novel’s narrator does begin her ...
review to come
The Return of the Soldier is an interesting read for several reasons, not least because it is a female authored book about the very male topic of the shell shock that often resulted from World War One. It's stylistic, and overly simplistic in places, and yet despite this it is extremely effective in...
Rebecca West was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield. Her father abandoned his family, and his death which followed hard after, left the family poor. West was educated and began a career as an actress before joining the feminist movement under the Pankhursts and writing for feminist magazines and papers....
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"?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'...
West’s first novel deals with love, war, grief, memory, loneliness, self-deception, class prejudice, materialism, and probably some other important questions that I didn't pick up on in my single reading.
This book didn't start very promisingly. I'm not immediately inclined to follow along with the reflections of a narrator whose sole self-appointed task was to create a comfortable nest for the splendid, great, amazing, etc. man she selflessly adored, who was satisfied with "the way that in the midst...
I wish I'd liked this more than I did. It sounded like such an interesting idea for a story but just didn't work for me. :/
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