The Return of the Soldier

by Pericles Lewis Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier was published in the last year of the first world war (1918). In the novel, a young war hero returns to his family estate having lost his memory of the war and the immediate pre-war years. Although he has married a woman of his… Continue Reading The Return of the Soldier

“Bliss” and “The Garden Party”

by Ruth Gilligan Born in 1888 into a socially prominent New Zealand family, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp began writing at an early age, publishing short stories in her high school magazine from as young as ten. At the age of fifteen, she moved to London and, despite a brief return to her homeland, spent the rest… Continue Reading “Bliss” and “The Garden Party”

Tarr

by Len Gutkin Tarr (1918), Wyndham Lewis’s first published novel, demonstrates a significant expansion and refinement of the techniques and themes Lewis had been developing in short stories published in The Little Review and in the short play The Enemy of the Stars (in Blast, 1914). Though the novel’s titular character functions partly as a… Continue Reading Tarr

Woolf’s Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1918-1920

by James Heffernan, Dartmouth College More than twenty years ago, Suzette Henke challenged what was then the reigning view of Virginia Woolf’s response to James Joyce’s Ulysses. To judge this response by Woolf’s most damning comments on the book and its author, Henke argued, is to overlook what she said about it in her reading… Continue Reading Woolf’s Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1918-1920

The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

By Emily Petermann After the publication of his first book of poetry, The Burning Wheel, in 1916, Aldous Huxley’s second book,[1]  The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems, appeared in August 1918 with Blackwell.  This little volume begins with the eponymous poem, actually a sequence of twenty-two sonnets, which Jerome Meckier called “the century’s most… Continue Reading The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems