Until “The Judge” was published Miss Rebecca West, in the opinion of many amateur and professional critics, was the most promising young woman to enter the field of literature in the reign of King George. Her advent to the literary world was impressive, and in a little book on Henry James in the “Writers of the Day” series she revealed a capacity of interpretation and facility of expression which made her elders envious and her contemporaries jealous. It was obvious to the casual reader of this book, and of her journalistic contributions, that not only had she the artistic temperament, but that she was familiar with its display in others, and that she had read widely, discriminatingly, and understandingly. Moreover, she was a thoroughly emancipated young woman and bore no marks of the cage that had restrained her sex. Her cleverness, her erudition, her resourcefulness were admitted. It was rated to be an asset, also, that she did not hesitate to call a spade a spade or to use the birch unsparingly when she felt it was for the benefit of the reading public, misled and deluded as it so often is by false prophets, erring evangelists, and self-seeking promoters. In other words, though she had sentiment and sympathy, she knew how to use them judiciously. In “Notes on Novels” she constantly reminds herself that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human. One must know the truth. When one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Miss West does not intend that her countrymen shall display these deformities.
Her first novel, “The Return of the Soldier,” a fictional exposition of the Freudian wish, was acclaimed by critics as the first fulfilment of the promise she had given. The teachings of the Austrian mystic were not much known then in England, the country that now seems to have swallowed them, bait, line, and sinker, not only in the fields of fiction but in pedagogy and in medicine; so Miss West's little book was more widely read and discussed than it might be today when Miss May Sinclair, Mr. J. D. Beresford, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and many other popular novelists have made his theories look like facts to the uninitiated.
The story is of Christopher, the ideal type of young Englishman who knows how to fight and to love.
“He possessed in a great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spring, foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed with a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness and the soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy.”
It is narrated by his cousin who has loved him platonically since youth. Chris had a romantic and ardent love affair with an inn-keeper's daughter in his youth, but he married Kitty, a beautiful little conventional non-temperamental young woman with a charming and cultivated soprano voice, of the class of women who
“are obscurely aware it is their civilising mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men so that they shall desire and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future.”
He goes to the war, gets concussion of the brain which causes amnesia, or forgetfulness of certain epochal events in his life, particularly his marriage to Kitty. “Who the devil is Kitty?” he replies when he is told she might have something to say on hearing of his plan to marry Margaret Allingham. Though some of the events of his life from twenty-one, when he fell in love with Margaret, to thirty-six, when he got injured, can be revived in his memory by Jenny, a resourceful understanding person, the sort of cousin every man should have, no argumentation can reconcile him to Kitty, and “he said that his body and soul were consumed with desire for Margaret and that he would never rest until he once more held her in his arms.”
After exhausting every means that love and science can suggest to jog his memory or wipe out the amnesia, it is decided to bring him and Margaret together. No one who had known her as the “Venus of Monkey Island,” a composite of charity and love, would recognise her now, seamed and scarred and ravaged by squalid circumstance, including dreary matrimony to a man with a weak chest that needed constant attention. Moreover, “all her life long Margaret had partaken of the inalienable dignity of a requited love, and lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house.” Such experience had left deforming scars. However, Chris sees her with the eyes of youth, and her presence resurrects juvenile emotions. Under their influence Margaret undergoes transformation.
“She had a little smile in her eyes as though she were listening to a familiar air played far away, her awkwardness seemed indecision as to whether she would walk or dance to that distant music, her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse fasten its frock.”