The Return of the Soldier (Modern Library Torchbearers) - Softcover

9780812971224: The Return of the Soldier (Modern Library Torchbearers)
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A soldier returns home transformed by World War I, sending shock waves through the lives of three women, in Rebecca West’s groundbreaking debut novel
 
Jenny has been waiting for the return of her cousin, Lieutenant Chris Baldry, from the faraway front lines of the war in France. She has kept vigil alongside Chris’s wife, Kitty, who has also been mourning the death of their first child. However, when Chris returns to their isolated estate outside of London, he is a man transformed, suffering from shell shock and believing he is still twenty years old. He is baffled by his surroundings, which have somehow aged beyond his memory, and he’s hopelessly, obsessively in love with a woman. Except—the woman he’s in love with is not his wife. He doesn’t even remember her, or the son they lost. Instead, he declares his undying love for Margaret, a poor innkeeper’s daughter with whom he shared a passionate summer romance fifteen years prior.
 
Rebecca West published her often-overlooked debut novel at the age of only twenty-six during the height of World War I, and was one of the first writers to explore the impact of posttraumatic stress in literature. The result is a tense, gripping portrait of sacrifice, regret, and the transformative power of war to alter our understanding of ourselves.

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Review:
It would be a crime to give away even the barest outline of Rebecca West's apparently simple, always agonizing first novel. We shall say only that The Return of the Soldier concerns the title character and three very different women to whom he is linked in very different ways--by blood, by marriage, and by love. It is also an imaginative study (one drenched in realism) of intimacy and illusion, possession and a terrible, destructive snobbery. On one estate outside London, even as the Great War and familial loss are taking their toll, the inhabitants strive for a measured, outwardly exquisite existence. All must remain as it was while their Chris is at war: each person, each object in its proper place. "You probably know the beauty of that view," the narrator buttonholes us, looking out the nursery window:
For when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his marriage, he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable photos in the illustrated papers.
But of late this universe unto itself cannot quite keep out an England altered by ambition and industry. Only a few miles away a "red suburban stain," Wealdstone, has somehow cropped up. And one day all is permanently altered--or, rather, revealed--when a Wealdstone resident comes bearing news of Captain Baldry. Mrs. William Gray is clearly not of Chris's wife Kitty and his cousin Jenny's class, as Kitty in particular makes her aware. "Again her gray eyes brimmed," Jenny observes. "People are rude to one, she visibly said, but surely not nice people like this." How is it, then, that this dreary, "dingy" woman knows Chris and knows that something has happened to him? And how is it that Jenny soon comes to see her as someone "whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room"?

In the remainder of this brief, perfect novel, a vanished (or repressed) past and its lost prospect of happiness comes to the fore. Rebecca West is best remembered for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941), but she displays the same vision--and a similar degree of realism--in her charged 1916 novel. Many readers will passionately regret the book's last twist, even as they know it to be artistically as well as historically true. --Kerry Fried

From the Inside Flap:
Set during World War I on an isolated country estate just outside London, Rebecca West’s haunting novel The Return of the Soldier follows Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, as he makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers only as a childhood friend, and the poor innkeeper’s daughter he once courted leave Chris to languish in a safe, dreamy past—or will they help him recover his memory so that he can return to the front? The answer is revealed through a heartwrenching, unexpected sacrifice.
The text of this Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the first American edition, published in 1918, and features original illustrations by Norman Price.

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  • PublisherModern Library
  • Publication date2004
  • ISBN 10 0812971221
  • ISBN 13 9780812971224
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages112
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780141180656: The Return of the Soldier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780141180656
Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998
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  • 9781844086986: The Return Of The Soldier (Virago Modern Classics)

    VIRAGO, 2010
    Softcover

  • 9780349010380: Return Of The Soldier

    Virago...
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  • 9781609422806: Return of a Soldier

    Lits, 2010
    Hardcover

  • 9780486839301: The Return of the Soldier (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

    Dover ..., 2020
    Softcover

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