Having read Harriet's review of Rebecca West's first novel The Return of the Soldier
Shell-shocked Chris Baldry returns from the war with no memory of his relationship with his beautiful wife, Kitty. The woman he does seek - and finds - is Margaret Grey, dowdy, worn, of a lower social class, but the person with whom Chris knew deep love many years before. The story is told by Chris's cousin, Jenny, who has long held a hopeless passion for him but who, more fervently than the empty Kitty, longs to see him returned to his old and true self.
Margaret appears in her yellowish raincoat, her straw hat with its funereal plumes, and "the smile of the inveterate romanticist" and is seen as "a spreading stain on the fabric of our life", but it is she who holds the key to Chris's recovery so she is tolerated but later accepted by Jenny at least. The contrast between the poor Margaret and the wealth and grandeur of Baldry Court and its family is well expressed, for example, "She was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children."
Some of the writing is very fine, some of it over-emotional with a youthful urgency - it is florid and over-written in places, but elsewhere it's restrained and assured. Much is made of the importance and effect of light in the book, presumably as a metaphor for Chris's amnesiac 'darkness', and themes of age and class-distinction recur frequently, but above all it's a love story, short, dramatic, and worth reading.
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My thanks for all the excellent comments on yesterday's post and the wonderful suggestions of collections of letters. I think I shall have to set up a separate books section for "Cornflower readers recommend....." (or at least list as many as possible in a dedicated post).
