The Return of the “Spiritual Soldier”: Rebecca West’s Henry James

Since Rebecca West’s death in 1983, her critical study Henry James (1916) has received a range of divergent, often antithetical, responses from those who frame it as the final act of the debate between the Master and West’s then lover, H. G. Wells. This paper instead draws attention to West’s Henry James as one of a series of early critical and fictional works that saw West engage with James’s oeuvre from the perspective of her civilian experience of the Great War: a conflict in whose psychological disquiet she would find need for, and a creative resonance with, James’s late writings.