The Return of the Soldier

“Brilliant … [West was] an artist who wrote wonderful prose, who took chances with language and cadence, and who wrote poetically, even of prosaic subjects.”—The New Republic

Rebecca West

Novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic, Rebecca West was one of the century’s most brilliant and forceful writers. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield on December 21, 1892, she was educated at George Watson’s Ladies College. She adopted the nom de plume Rebecca West from Ibsen’s Romserholm, in which she once appeared.

At an early age, she threw herself into the suffragette movement. In 1911, she joined the staff of the Freewoman, and the following year became a political writer on the socialist newspaper the Clarion. Her love affair with the novelist H.G. Wells began in 1913 and lasted for ten, not always happy, years. Their son, Anthony West, her only child, was born in 1914. After the break with Wells, she went to America where she lectured and formed what was to be a long association reviewing for the New York Herald-Tribune. In 1930, she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker, and they lived in Buckinghamshire until his death in 1968, after which Rebecca West moved to London.

Her first published book was a critical study of Henry James. Her second was a novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which was recently made into a successful film. She published eight novels, including The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), and the largely autobiographical The Fountain Overflows (1957). Her last novel, The Birds Fall Down (1966), was adapted for BBC television in 1978.

In the mid-thirties, she made several trips to the Balkans to gather material for a travel book. However, her interest in the subject deepened, and she returned to the area many times to collect more material. The result was her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941 in two volumes. In her obituary, The Times (London) remarked of this work that it “was immediately recognized as a magnum opus, as astonishing in its range, in its subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression.” As a result of the book’s publication, she was invited during the war to superintend the BBC broadcasts to Yugoslavia. After the war, she was present at the Nuremberg Trials, and her account of these and of other trials which arose out of the relation of the individual to the state, were published in two books: The Meaning of Treason (1949) and A Train of Powder (1955).

Samuel Hynes

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of several major works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation, Edwardian Occasions, and The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes’s wartime experiences as a Marine Corps pilot were the basis for his highly praised memoir, Flights of Passage. The Soldiers’ Tale, his book about soldiers’ narratives of the two world wars and Vietnam, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.