 The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with mental trauma and its effects on the family, as well as the light it sheds on their fraught relationships.Though initially reviewed by critics, literary scholars treating West's work tended to focus on her later novels and dismissed "The Return of the Soldier" until the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty first.The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1982, and later into a stage musical of the same name in 2014 by Charles Miller.