The Return of the Soldier -- New Introduction By Victoria Glendinning - Softcover

West, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0919630650 ISBN 13: 9780919630659

Publisher: The Dial Press; Virago Modern Classics, 1980

Synopsis

Captain Chris Baldry returns home from the Great War a victim of shellshock amnesia, the last fifteen years obliterated from his mind. He has no recollection of his wife, Kitty a cold, moonlight beauty who is entirely devoted to creating a perfectly arranged life at their exquisite home, Baldry Court; he remembers his devoted cousin Jenny only as a childhood playmate. Instead, Chris desires to resume an affair with his first love, Margaret Allington, an innkeeper's daughter and now a shabby suburban matron "repul- sively furred with poverty and neglect." The three women have a to leave him in the past where he wishes to be or to "cure" him. It is Margaret whose beauty of soul reveals a love so great that she can make the final sacrifice.... The Return of the Soldier is Rebecca West's first published work of fiction, a woman's war novel in which she powerfully explores a recurring theme in all her work the nurturing and life-sustaining force of woman in a world governed by the destructive and deathly powers of man.
"One must conclude that the greatest living example of a woman... who has been both a thinker and an artist, and who has managed over some sixty years to express a spacious sense of reality, is Rebecca West." Samuel Hynes, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press; Virago Modern Classics
• Publication date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0919630650
• ISBN 13: 9780919630659
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188