Abstract

Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier offers an imaginative and philosophically intriguing twist on the familiar trope of the irreconcilable tension between a man’s love for a woman and his duties to his wife and family. In West’s hands this theme becomes a mere framing device for a deeper conflict, one in which the need for happiness is set against the prerogatives of truth, the whim of fantasy against the realm of public facts. In this paper I discuss these themes in the light of recent philosophical discussions of the nature and value of truth.