Near the end of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, a doctor from London is brought in to solve the very curious case of a middle-aged English officer, Chris Baldry: shell-shock has reverted his mind back to its twenty-year-old self, where he cannot, beyond the most banal specificities, recall his life after that point, not even his own beautiful wife, Kitty; nor can he fully appreciate how age has changed the face of his adoring cousin and childhood playmate, Jenny, who is the narrator of the tale.

As far as Captain Baldry is concerned, in fact, he is still in love with Margaret Allington, a lower-class girl who lived in a place not far from the family estate called Monkey Island, where she and her father humbly kept an inn. Chris and Margaret were fervently in love, until they were not, for reasons the novella takes its time in revealing.

Chris wants nothing more than to see Margaret, to the ire of his socially refined yet spiritually malnourished wife. It is Chris’s love for Margaret, and her cautious acceptance of it—as she is much older now, and married herself—that stokes Kitty’s hatred, inspiring her to throw specialists at the newly-young Chris until she finds the one who will finally sever the knot of her husband’s mind, Dr. Gilbert Anderson. […]