The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny.
The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with mental trauma and its effects on the family, as well as the light it sheds on their fraught relationships.
Though initially reviewed by critics, literary scholars treating West's work tended to focus on her later novels and dismissed The Return of the Soldier until the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first.
The novel begins as the narrator, Jenny, describes her cousin by marriage, Kitty Baldry, pining in the abandoned nursery where her dead first son would have been raised.
Jenny recognises that the artifice of the house she and Kitty have so painstakingly decorated for Chris is a poor substitute for the love and temporary home he finds in Margaret.
"[2] Throughout the novel, Chris is treated simply as the "soldier" and is often not given a full examination by Jenny as the narrator, thus his character is flat, an individual stuck in his masculine function in society.
Obsessed with self-control, good breeding, manners and making life tidy and comfortable, Kitty creates a facade of happiness which she projects on Baldry Court.
This additional shift beyond simply the period at war in France reinforces the idea that his trauma could be linked to his marriage with Kitty, or any number of other events.
[3] The trauma Chris suffers in The Return of the Soldier becomes an isolated piece of evidence of the war's effect on a society that appears to be otherwise functioning normally.
Despite West's expressing in 1928 that the novel is not focused on psychoanalysis, critics have paid close attention to it, often criticising the simplicity of the psychoanalytic solution to Chris's traumatic amnesia.
The rapidity of the recovery, and the failure of the reader to witness the conversation between Margaret and Chris are often cited by several critics, especially Wolfe, Orel, Gledhill and Sokoloff.
[4][5][7] Literary scholars Cristina Pividori, Wyatt Bonikowski and Steve Pinkerton all seek to challenge the negative reception of the psychological tools in the novel.
In West's assessment of the situation, the soldier's desire to survive leads him to a search for love and life so that he may communicate the atrocities which he has witnessed.
[5] Pinkerton argues that the end of The Return of the Soldier points to Margaret as a character and individual who is extremely adept in analysing and in tune with Chris and that the actual event is plausible within current psychoanalytic theory.
Amid his commentary on the elusiveness of any information about West from her or her publisher, Lawrence gave the book praise calling it "an authentic masterpiece, a one-act drama of [war] with music."
Earlier criticism was characterised by a negative response, often dismissing the novel on grounds of amateurishness of execution in both its style and use of thematic tools such as its use of Freudian psychoanalysis.
[4][5][7] In 1928 it was adapted by the writer John Van Druten into a play of the same title which ran for 46 performances at the Playhouse Theatre in London's West End.
The novel was made into a 1982 film starring Alan Bates as Baldry and co-starring Julie Christie, Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson, and Ann-Margret.
In 2014 a musical adaptation premiered in London, with a book by Tim Sanders and composer by Charles Miller; it subsequently had runs in Manchester and Ipswich 4 years later.