What a remarkable novella. I've never run across any mention of it that I can remember, yet it surely stands with other, more celebrated works of the time. It's a perfect companion to _The Good Soldier_ and _Jacob's Room_, for starters. And _In Our Time_, too, in a way. It's the narrator who makes it astonishing: a peripheral first-person who is free to reveal her own flaws and shallowness even as she transforms and matures beyond those initial limitations. Indirectly but clearly, it's an indictment of World War I and of the fading but still powerful snobbery and paternalism of the British class system. It reaches back to Romanticism in its rapturous evocations of the landscape (British writing of the 19th century has always made me imagine that the countryside of that island must be the most gorgeous in the world), but the Edenic cannot save the soldier whose experience has ruined him into the 20th century.

Short and sweet: quite a good introduction to the modernist novel.

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. When she was 19, she began what would be a ten year affair with H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells liked the ladies and apparently thought he wore pants made of glass (see various, including Philip Gooden). West apparently liked the men.

West and Wells had pet names for each other. He was Jaguar, and she was Panther. She also got pregnant. She didn’t have a wedding, and Wells was married (despite his many affairs, he never divorced). Their child was Anthony Panther also called Anthony West. West delivered the child outside of London, which she had left because of the stigma attached to an unmarried mother. Apparently in later years, Wells and West disagreed about whether the child was planned or not, with West claiming at one point Wells had impregnated her to keep. Their child apparently was quite bitter later in life. I don’t wonder why.

West went on to have a very good career, including as a journalist and travel writer, and it is somewhat upsetting that she is not as popular as her one time lover Wells, who might have stolen a woman’s work and passed it off as his own.

It is vital that you know the above because it will influence how you see this story which was written after the birth of West’s child and deals with love, lust, and class.

And that is the problem with this new policy by GR staff, which slim hope it is, one hopes they change. It is close to impossible to separate an author from a work. It’s true as more than one person pointed out in the feedback thread that many people would want to know if they are reading the work of a pedophile or a rapist. Imagine O.J. Simpson’s proposed book but not being able to mention anything about the spousal abuse or trials. Goodreads was prior this policy change a place for readers to find this information, so they could make an informed buying decision. This policy nulls this.

Furthermore, it limits learning and limits any teacher or class who wants to use Goodreads (which many have been). How can a teacher encourage students to leave a critical review if students cannot mention the author’s life or background? How can students discuss, review, or learn in such an environment? They can’t. Goodreads will no longer be a place where you can learn from book reviews.

That is why this policy stinks. That is why this review focuses on the author.

It's a brief book but manages to capture so much history between a few characters, and how war damages everyone -including those who remain behind. The ending is fascinating because no matter what there will be one kind of a misery or other for everyone. Definitely an under-rated story.

This novella of less than 200 large print pages is an intense experience. Written at the close of the First World War, it epitomizes class relationships and the situation of women at the time. These relationships are demonstrated in the women's reactions to each other and to the soldier of the title who returns with amnesia from shell-shock, remembering only his first love, Margaret, now a working-class married woman and not his elegant, high-class wife. Narrated by the soldier's cousin, Jenny, the perspective is that of the upper class, although also of someone with genuine feeling, perhaps love for the soldier, Chris. Speaking of Margaret at their first meeting, she writes: "I...hated her as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggle out of crannies which are their decent home, and introduce ugliness to the light of day."

The story relates how the three women deal with Chris' homecoming when all he wants to do is spend time with Margaret whom he still adores, having no recollection of events since their farewell fifteen years earlier. The elegant lifestyle of Kitty and her marriage is shown to be a facade with Margaret the one who truly cares for Chris to the extent of understanding how a "cure" can be effected and thereby sacrificing her own happiness with him. Rebecca West ably contrasts appearances and reality much to the detriment of the upper class, although perhaps Margaret is almost too good to be true. Surprisingly, as he is the focus of the novella, we never receive any direct information about Chris' own feelings, which underlines the priority given by the female author to the emotions and actions of the women in this story.

The language in this is amazing. It’s a very short book about a soldier who has returned from WWI. He has come home injured, in that he has forgotten the last 15 years and now believes himself in love with his first girlfriend, a woman in a vastly inferior social class. It’s about shell-shock and the class differences and how upper class people view the lower class. It is really not complimentary to the upper class.