“This house is different”

This chapter offers a reading of Rebecca West’s 1918 debut novel The Return of the Soldier, which tells the story of a British soldier whose head injury on the battlefields of World War I sends him back to a home he does not recognize. The novel is one of the first to engage directly with the effects of World War I, and yet its focus is not the horrors of the battlefield but rather the effects of war upon the home front, unsettling some of the romantic notions of homecoming that the Homeric epic celebrates and prompting an exploration of the complicated relationship of memory and its loss within narratives of return. Read together with West’s novel, the Odyssey emerges as a poem equally interested in the complicated emotions of homecoming—the pleasure and pain that surround absence and return, remembering and forgetting.