World War I, the backdrop of Rebecca West's first novel, was "the first war that women could imagine, as Samuel Hynes writes in his eloquent Introduction, "and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel". However, The Return of the Soldier (1918) takes place not on the battlefield but in an isolated country house. Narrated by a woman who, like West, has never experienced war and yet for whom the war is very real, it examines the relationships between three women and a soldier suffering from shell shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the choice between the romantic past and the horrifying present, between love and reality.
