The Return of the Soldier is a novella written between 1916 and 1917 and published just as WWI ended in 1918. Rebecca West wrote during the Modernist movement, and was a contemporary of modernist giants such as Virginia Woolf, but the novel does not make use of key modernist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, multiple points of view, or absurdism.
Rather, by setting the novel in an isolated English country house and telling the story through a single narrator who possesses an unusual level of insight into the people around her, West evokes earlier Victorian novels, such as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights or Charles Dickens's Bleak House. As an acerbic prose stylist attuned to her characters' social foibles and hypocrisies, West has much in common with Evelyn Waugh, another upper-class British writer working in the first half of the 20th century. West's references to earlier literary eras make sense for a novel that is concerned with nostalgic longing for a vanishing past.
At the same time, West was interested in central thematic concerns shared by many modernist writers, such as ambivalence towards industrialization and technology. Like writers such as Woolf and T.S. Eliot, her writing demonstrates a belief that WWI had fundamentally altered individuals' relationships to each other and their broader society.
