What is a ‘woman’s’ book?

When the journalist, Rebecca West, published her first novel in 1918, it was dismissed by critics as a ‘woman’s’ book and too ‘feminine’. The reasons for this are clear. The action of The Return of the Soldier takes place entirely in the domestic sphere of Baldry Court, to which the eponymous soldier, Chris Baldry, returns during the First World War, suffering from amnesia caused by shellshock. He recognises the narrator of the novel, his spinster cousin, Jenny, but has no memory of his wife Kitty or the life they led together. The last thing he can recall is the working-class girl he loved fifteen years earlier, Margaret, an innkeeper’s daughter on Monkey Island. The novel prioritises sentiment and emotion over and above anything else, as Jenny works through the turbulent responses to Chris’s return, both her own and other peoples’.

When Chris arrives, he insists that he must see Margaret, whom Jenny traces to her life of married drudgery. Although she is now middle-aged and dowdy, Chris doesn’t see it, and he has entirely forgotten how and why their relationship ended. Margaret humours him with mixed feelings, tolerating both Kitty’s antipathy and Jenny’s confusion, as the women work out whether or not they should ‘return’ Chris to the real world, and if so, how this should be undertaken.

Despite the label, this is a very sophisticated novel, quiet and understated yet actually dealing with some big human questions. West was already well known as a socialist and feminist writer, and she uses these characters to reveal the outmoded nature of Edwardian society, which was in the process of being deconstructed by the war. She uses the format of the ‘woman’s novel’ to explore the difficulties faced by women, married and unmarried, as the unorthodox romance plays out. West experiments with narrative techniques, with the unreliable narrator in Jenny, and with emerging ideas of psychoanalysis as Kitty employs a doctor to help them to ‘cure’ Chris. At the heart of the novel is another moral issue: should Chris be ‘cured,’ which will mean a return to the war, or be allowed to remain happy at home?

The ending of the novel is deeply ambiguous and unsettling as West denies her readers the comfortable closure which might be expected of a ‘woman’s novel’. There is a complexity in the debates contained in The Return of the Soldier that move it far beyond the implied simplicity of such a label. Chick Lit this is not, even though it primarily concerns the emotional relationships of women. As with Master and Commander last time, it feels misleading to label this book, to suggest a particular type of reader. My conclusions? I suppose I think we should all be open to reading anything. We don’t have to like it, but in the case of this novel, most of the people I know who have read it seem to share my opinion. It makes us think about so many things war-related and otherwise, many as relevant today as they were in 1918.