Rebecca West 
The Return of the Soldier (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 



In Rebecca West’s
The Return of the Soldier (1918), Chris Baldry comes home from World War I shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia. He believes that he is twenty years old and in love with an innkeeper’s daughter whom he has not actually seen in fifteen years. His elegant wife and spinster cousin must suffer the chagrin of being forgotten, as well as face the challenge of how to cure his mental illness.

Circa l’autore

Cicily Isabel Fairfield, who adopted the pen name ‘Rebecca West’ from Ibsen’s
Rosmersholm, was born in London on December 21, 1892. She participated in sometimes-violent women’s rights demonstrations and moved in suffragist circles. Romantically linked with H. G. Wells and Charlie Chaplin, West ultimately married banker Henry Andrews. In 1948,
Time magazine called her ‘indisputably the world’s Number One woman writer, ‘ and in 1958 she was named Dame of the British Empire.