Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking

Our ideal therefore, must be a language as clear as glass—the person looking out of the window
knows there is glass there, but he is not concerned with it; what concerns him is what comes
through from the other side.
Elizabeth Bowen1

When confronted with the decision of whether or not to include selections from Elizabeth

Bowen’s work in the Aubane Historical Society’s North Cork Anthology (1993), the editors, Jack

Lane and Brendan Clifford, seemed uncertain about how best to approach her. Of greatest

concern to them were various disturbing irregularities that they perceived to be a prominent part

of her personal history, irregularities that complicated their desire to identify her with one

national identity or another. As they detail their deliberations, special note is made of the various

ways that the Dublin-born writer who lived part of her life in County Cork had strayed across

borders – she was raised in an Anglo-Irish family, she lived part time in London, and she worked

for the British government during World War II. That the constitutive facts of Bowen’s personal

history involve closely interwoven and even overlapping ideas of national identity only increased

the editors’ difficulty when trying to describe them. Troubled by the conflicting claims that her

personal history presented, and perhaps prompted by a desire to spare themselves further

hesitation and indecision, the editors finally declared that she was not an Irish writer at all, but

was rather an “English” novelist. Further, “[s]he was not a North Cork writer, either in the sense

of being a product of North Cork society, or of being interested in it and writing about it.” Given

their repudiation of Bowen, one might expect that they would choose to excise her work from the

anthology altogether, but instead, they devoted a considerably greater amount of space to her
 2

work than they did to many other writers included. However, at the same time, they indicated

their frustration with her and the problems that her history presented by drawing a line of

cancellation through her name which is printed at the top of the first page of her entry. The

editors explained: “We include her in this anthology, in deleted form, in order to explain why she

does not belong to it” (9).2

The paradoxical and innovative strategy that Lane and Clifford adopted in an attempt to

come to terms with the complicated issues involved in conceptualizing, describing, and

evaluating Bowen’s national identity reveals -- at the very least -- a highly ambivalent response

to the various pressures and threats that Bowen’s personal history presents to conventional

notions of identity and political and philosophical coherence. Clearly, the editors felt that Bowen

had stepped out of bounds, that she had violated customarily conceived boundaries and had gone

“too far.” A good part of Lane’s and Clifford’s enterprise centers around the single task of

finding an expedient accommodation, one, that is, that would harmonize the competing claims

that Bowen’s history presents. Yet rather than dispensing with the problems Bowen’s history

creates, the editors’ delete mark has the (we can presume unintentional) consequence of

highlighting problems, seen in especially high relief in this case, that biographies such as

Bowen’s present to conventional notions of definition, identity, and fit, and their conflicted

solution leaves open the question of whether Bowen’s national identity can be accommodated by

a particular form or whether the competing claims that her personal history presents are

irreconcilable. Ultimately, then, rather than situating her among the not-Irish or the not-Cork,

the editors’ horizontal line suspends Bowen in a state of limbo, neither properly in nor properly

out, both norm and deviation, her personal and national boundaries obscured, not clarified.
 3

For some time, there have been degrees of doubt about Bowen’s proper position within

the field of literary studies as well. Troubled by the competing claims that her narratives present,

critics have likewise struggled with the unsystematic ways that her peculiar and in ways often

transgressive and non-identical body of work resists historical, generic, and ethnic incorporation,

and have historically struggled to place or locate her vast oeuvre in one tradition or another. As

a result, as Neil Corcoran has written in his recent study, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return,

Bowen’s work has occupied a kind of critical “limbo” (11). Never has her work been quite in,

but never has it ever been quite out either. A glance at a few influential trends in past Bowen

criticism reveals an uncommon lack of consensus about how to approach and read her work, and

an uncommon lack of consensus regarding her position in relation to the history of twentieth-

century English and Irish literature. Earlier interpreters including William Heath, generally

regarded her as a lesser social or domestic realist, primarily concerned with issues relating to the

demise of the Irish Protestant ascendancy, and typically built their readings on a renunciation of

the irregular and uncustomary aspects and competing pressures apparent in her work. She was a

“link” as Victoria Glendinning wrote in her 1978 biography, Elizabeth Bowen, connecting the

more luminous “Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark” (xv). Other early readers

including Harriet Blodgett rejected Heath’s critical attribution and read Bowen as a

“psychological realist who must use symbolic methods” (8). In this suggestive study, Blodgett

discusses what she sees as a Jungian tendency in Bowen’s aesthetic. Contending that Bowen’s

work will not bear too literal a reading, Blodgett reads Bowen as a “modern, and a Christian,

myth-maker,” ultimately inspired by the myth of the fall who was primarily concerned with

“heightenings of actuality…transmutations of the literal” (18, 19, 22). Other readers, including

Hermione Lee, argued for Bowen’s recognition as a modern writer because of her “analysis of
 4

dislocation, unease, and betrayal.” Like Blodgett, Lee was especially concerned with previous

restrictive classifications of Bowen and saw in Bowen’s work a fusion of two traditions, “that of

Anglo-Irish literature and history, and that of European modernism” (12, 11). The lack of

consensus regarding the qualities and value of Bowen’s work is evidenced in recent critical

studies as well. For example, in his 1988 study of English fiction of the early modernist period,

Douglass Hewitt reads her as one of a number of limited “minor” novelists who “turned [her]

back…on technical innovation” and wrote “delicate small-scale post-Jamesian studies, mostly of

children and adolescent girls” (198). She has also recently been read as a “critically practicing

feminist” (hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen 20),3 a “last-minute Irish Victorian” who adapted

Sheridan Le Fanu’s narrative techniques to represent “altered experiences of reality under the

blitz” ( McCormick vii, 209, 210), and a novelist whose “writerly qualities and philosophical

concerns” locate her somewhat obscurely “at the highbrow end of the [as yet ill-defined]

middlebrow” (Humble 78, n 49).

As valuable as these past readings are, generally, even the most sophisticated of Bowen’s

previous readers declined to take up the conspicuous and dislocating irregularities – the

intriguing and often unfamiliar instabilities of form, language, and composition – that lend to her

work its uncommon elusiveness and its uncommon adaptability to a variety of interpretive ploys.

The infrequent time that the strange and non-identical elements in her work were noted, they

were most often dismissed or derided as defects of temperament or talent, unaccountable gaffes,

obscuring distractions that were not worthy of sustained critical attention.

More recently, though, readers have begun to redirect our attention away from the

identical elements in Bowen’s narratives and have sought for ways of accounting for the multiple

ways that her narratives stray across boundaries and resist neat identifications. Indeed, recent
 5

criticism has focused almost explicitly on the diverse ways that Bowen’s stylistic and structural

irregularities – including her weird and inconsistent mimeticism, the dramatizations of impasse

and non- or dissolved presence, the elliptical dialogue and lacunae in plotting – often but not

always efface areas of expected significance by unsystematically conferring onto the diverse

narrative and formal elements of her narratives unfamiliar, unexpected, and sometimes

apparently arbitrary emphases and values. For example, in her recent study, Elizabeth Bowen:

The Shadow Across the Page, Maud Ellmann suggests that Bowen’s “fictions refuse to be

contained within a single frame of reference” and “in some cases confound…the literary theories

brought to bear upon it” (3,xi). Focusing on the often ungainly and “florid clashes between

literary forms” seen in Bowen’s narratives, Ellmann discusses ways that Bowen’s fiction

estranges the boundary between “classic realism and modernist experimentalism” (3,8).4 In his

recent discussion, Neil Corcoran attends to the ‘arresting strangeness” in her work and situates

his interpretation in his notion of Bowen’s awkward and transgressive “bilocality” (by which he

refers to her living “between” Ireland and England). Corcoran discusses the ways that the

“disconcerting ethics” in her work, revealed by the works’ “gaps, ellipses, absences, hauntings,

silences, and aporias” are unexpectedly inflected with affirmation (13). In what is undoubtedly

the most audacious recent reading of Bowen’s work, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, citing

her works’ egregious unconventionality, argue against all previous readings of her work, and

suggest instead that Bowen’s fictional narratives

are open to fundamental rereadings…which at once transform the

status and importance of Bowen’s work and effect a deconstruction of
everything that is seemingly most conventional and reassuring about
the very notion of the novel (xvi).

Citing in particular Bowen’s under examined and undervalued novel Eva Trout or Changing

Scenes, they suggest that Bowen’s work undermines the epistemological foundations of the
 6

novel, necessitating “a new critical vocabulary” (142), one that eludes all externally imposed

vocabularies (xvii, xix, 142).

However, while the radical narrative and formal transgressions erratically displayed and

written into Bowen’s narratives are often felt to be urgent demands to be recognized as

irreducibly other, Bowen’s works’ resistances and the unfamiliar and often irregular problems

that the non-identical elements of her work present seem less indicative of an irreducible

otherness or a conceptual or lexical failure than they do of the persistent uncertainty that readers

share about how to approach and represent the competing pressures apparent in Bowen’s art.

While Samuel Beckett’s work, to which Bowen’s is increasingly and favorably compared, was

recognized as non-identical from the start and continues to be recognized and read as non-

identical,5 because the identical and the non-identical in Bowen’s work insist, at times

hyperbolically, on their mutual entanglement, her work challenges us, in ways that Beckett’s

does not, to make sense of the unruly and often egregious concatenation in her work of the

regular and the irregular, the familiar and the strange. Above all else, Bowen’s narratives are

marked by a central linking of sometimes apparently incongruous or contradictory forces or

elements whose interpretation is dependent both on laws peculiar to itself and laws commonly

recognized, even as those representations sometimes exceed the boundaries of the conceptual

categories used to interpret them. Indeed, one wonders if the derision still apparent in some

Bowen criticism might be in part explained by what is perceived by some to be the intolerable

pressure of contradictory compulsions that form the signature of Bowen’s style, a pressure that

places her work, as Paul Muldoon suggests, along with Joyce’s and Beckett’s, at “some notional

cutting edge” (25). The most exciting aspect of this unusual quality of her work derives from the

various ways that the categorical excesses seen in Bowen’s work both invoke and discredit a
 7

sense of meaning, the ways these linked forms, in provocative and sometimes impudent ways,

confuse distinctions thereby questioning many of the larger structures of oppositional logic that

characterize the foundations of Western philosophy, language, and society. In other words,

because the relation between the non-identical and the identical in Bowen’s work cannot be

reduced or stabilized into an opposition between antithetical forces, her narratives resist

commonly employed metaphors of complementarity and coordination; simply put, it is difficult

to smother her work with our preconceptions because so much of what the work does and how it

does it resists them. Consequently, among other things, Bowen’s work offers unfamiliar ways

by which we might reconceptualize the relationship between realism and modernism, the

ambiguities of identity, and the obscuring effects of many familiar critical assumptions including

those pertaining to canonicity, notions of genre, and the representation of gender, sexuality,

class, nationhood, and ethnicity in literature.

In keeping with the present emphasis in Bowen criticism, the essays collected here attend

to the distinctive and unexpected pressures and relations in Bowen’s work, to some of the ways

that the work strays over boundaries and doesn’t always fit neat identifications. While the essays

are varied and do not provide a complete spectrum of contemporary responses, they are primarily

concerned with two salient characteristics of Bowen’s work: her at times intimidating artistic,

linguistic, and substantive difficultness, and her more recently recognized aesthetic, moral, and

cognitive complexity and distinctiveness. Specifically, these essays intend to examine and

analyze in considerable detail some of the stranger pressures and unfamiliar tensions heretofore

un- or under examined and that make her work uncommonly difficult to conceptualize, describe,

and evaluate, and that make the terms of appreciation and analysis difficult to apprehend and

apply; to present fuller and more nuanced accounts than were previously available of a number
 8

of these tensions; and partly on the basis of these two endeavors, to begin to develop ways of

thinking about and developing terms for understanding the novelty, force, difficulty, and

significance of Bowen’s work, and to develop the implications of these ideas for our thinking

about a wide range of contemporary concerns.

The ingenuity and complexity of many of these arguments testifies to both the

complexity and originality of Bowen’s art. In the first essay, “Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s

Beckettian Affinities,” Sinead Mooney begins the work of setting aside the edifice of social

realism that has obstructed critical efforts to represent Bowen’s narrative strangeness through an

exploration of the striking similarities apparent in the two writers’ work. In particular, Mooney

attends to the asymptotic approaches to zero that generate both writers’ novels, and pays special

attention to the ways that both writers’ stylistic investment in the “nuances of negativity” – she

sees in Beckett’s “depleted moribunds” parallels to Bowen’s many suspended protagonists—

discountenance classic narrative form. Particularly useful is Mooney’s exploration of the

suggestive correspondences apparent in two of the writer’s “unreadable” novels, Beckett’s Watt

and Bowen’s Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. While Bowen’s “defective” or non-identical

protagonist has generally been read as a kind of monster (her representation has been criticized

for being too bold, too brutal, too chalky, too inconsistent), Mooney reads Eva instead as a

“proto-postmodernist younger sister of…Watt”, both of whom suffer a “loss of filiation” from

conventional linguistic structures. While the odd concatenations in both of these novels both

provoke and resist a search for encompassing connections and apodictic readings, Mooney

attends instead to the various stylistic disruptions and panicked linguistic atmosphere apparent in

both and discusses ways that these irregularities dislocate fragile structures of identity and

jeopardize the reader’s confidence in hermetic structures of meaning.

 9

Jed Esty’s essay, “Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopmental

Plot,” reconsiders one of Bowen’s most frequently read novels, The Last September. While The

Last September has traditionally been read as a biographically based coming-of-age novel set

against the backdrop of war, distinguished by its “mannered,” post-Jamesian representation of

bourgeois pretenses and internecine war, Esty reads The Last September as a curiously complex

conjunction of two nineteenth-century novel forms, the gothic romance and the Bildungsroman..

Esty suggests that the novel’s signal feature lies not in its urbane representation of big houses

and tea parties, but lies instead in the curious ways that the novel invokes and discredits the

narrative and stylistic conventions associated with the two genres it alloys. Unlike many past

readers of The Last September, Esty attends more to the novel’s non-identical formal principles

than to Bowen’s imagined emotional affiliations and political intentions in order to explore how

the novel’s irregular plot, language, and characterization encode a narrative meaning that

exposes many of the contradictions inherent to settler colonialism and what Esty terms “the

larger inevitabilities of post-colonial nationalism.” Of particular interest to Esty are the novel’s

proliferating anticlimaxes and Bowen’s representation of her protagonist’s uneven and at times

deflected and occasionally temporarily stalled development, especially as it illuminates the

historical problematic of Anglo-Irish decline. By approaching her fiction in such a way, Esty

suggests that we can begin to reposition Bowen’s work at the center rather than on the fringes of

a revisionary model of modernist fiction, one that can be understood in terms of the “partial

displacement of nineteenth-century historical concepts of progress by twentieth-century

anthropological concepts of difference as the major frame of reference for narrative form.”

Although Bowen insisted that being a dislocated only child was not disadvantageous,

many readers have suggested that Bowen’s presumably wistful loneliness, especially in
 10

combination with what is typically read as an awkward and undesirable life lived “between”

Ireland and England, imbued her work with a kind of confused nostalgia for conservative

ascendancy values, and influenced her peculiar and sometimes sensational representation of

deracinated people, homeless lovers, and dispossessed children. However, in her essay,

“‘Something Else:’ Gendering Onliness in Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Fiction,” Elizabeth

Cullingford suggests that Bowen’s onliness was not only a positive catalyst, but formed one of

the driving forces of her creative process and influenced the shape of her aesthetic structures and

her exploration of oddly shaped, complicated, and mobile gender identities and sexual

orientations. Of special interest to Cullingford are Bowen’s characteristic and diverse uses of

modernist high-cultural allusion (specifically many of her dense similes which combine

references to painting, religion, and history) to emphasize the flexible and unsettled gendering of

many of Bowen’s characters, both onlys and siblings. While Bowen’s conspicuous practice of

allusion has in the past generally been overshadowed by the struggle to identify her as a small

interest novelist of manners, Cullingford suggests that Bowen derived inspiration from a farrago

of poetry, drama, painting, architecture, fairy tales, gothic and sensational literature, and

contemporary psychological and sexological treatises. By so doing, Cullingford not only

challenges the often encountered notion of Bowen as a small scale writer wanting in ambition

and confidence, but suggests the value of her narratives for our consideration of broader

questions, particularly about the interdigitation of psychology and aesthetics during the

modernist period.

One of the many under examined unevennesses in Bowen’s work concerns the

incompletely resolved representation of material reality. As a few of Bowen’s more recent

readers have noted, while Bowen’s characters often seem summarily drawn and are often
 11

curiously non-absorptive, things often but not always assume a kind of paradoxical hallucinatory

beingness and frequently seem to compete with characters for the right to claim “personalities,”

or at least to claim some simulacrum of quasi-ontological integrity. This uneasy relationship

between the intense if irreal representation of things and Bowen’s uneven, frequently diffused

representation of her characters produces an unexpected narrative encounter that is by no means

simple to conceptualize as it, among other things, forestalls the reader’s desire for a sense of

interpretive closure that is dependent on the psychological resolution of interpersonal qualities.

When confronted with the unusual representation of objects in Bowen’s fiction, most of Bowen’s

past readers (and a number of her present readers) continue to privilege the characters and

interpret the objects as mirrors of character and/or indices of morality. Yet as Elizabeth Inglesby

writes in her essay, “Expressive Objects: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes,” such

readings overlook the ways that places and things in Bowen’s narratives seem to occupy a more

than material plane of existence and to possess an esoteric sense of dignity and energy.

Throughout her study, Inglesby focuses on the strange solicitude represented between objects

and characters in Bowen’s fiction and non-fiction narratives and suggests that the relationship

represented between the physical and the psychological is fluid and flexible. Among its many

features, Inglesby’s reading illustrates difficulties inherent in interpreting narratives such as

Bowen’s that often but not always mock nostalgia for permanence and stability, as she links the

inconsistencies and paradoxes in Bowen’s fluctuating narrative style to difficulties experienced

by both Bowen’s narrators and Bowen’s readers inherent in controlling meaning. At the same

time, Inglesby’s essay suggests a number of fruitful areas for future study including the relation

of Bowen’s uncertain representation of material reality to the more conventional allotropic

animism represented in the works of other twentieth-century writers including D.H. Lawrence,
 12

and the relationship of some of the curious and unfamiliar tensions evoked by Bowen’s irregular

and inconsistent representation of the inanimate to issues of gender, sexuality, and political and

national identity.

The two final essays explore aspects of Bowen’s critically disesteemed nonfiction. Like

her fiction, Bowen’s many works of literary criticism and autobiographical writing are generally

disjunctive and/or non- or oddly progressive and reveal unexpected conjunctions and uneasy,

idiosyncratic, and unsystematically employed emphases that often vitiate conventional efforts to

interpret them. As a consequence, these works have generally frustrated past readers who have

typically dismissed them as inept, slight and personal products of an intellect whose ambitions

perhaps too often exceeded her abilities. For example, because Bowen’s intense and short, eerie

memoir Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood has typically been read as a minor

addendum to the more generally praised Bowen’s Court, it has rarely received sustained critical

attention. However, in her essay, “That Eternal ‘Now’: Memory and Subjectivity in Elizabeth

Bowen’s Seven Winters,” Victoria Stewart uses this strange and evocative document to explore

artistic issues, especially those pertinent to memory and its representation, that were important to

Bowen, and to explore some of the challenging questions regarding Bowen’s relation to literary

modernism and literary realism. One of the most important aspects of Stewart’s discussion is her

analysis of the ways the uncertain narrative style used in Seven Winters undermines the

conventional modernist notion of the individual consciousness as the premier organizing force in

aesthetic endeavors. Ultimately, Stewart suggests that analyses of the unstable and competing

pressures in Seven Winters can enhance our discussions of representational appearance in art and

its relationship to worlds both real and invented, while at the same time it provides suggestive

opportunities through which readers can explore competing concepts of mimesis.

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In the final essay, “The Impersonal Personal: Value, Voice and Agency in Elizabeth

Bowen’s Literary and Social Criticism,” Brook Miller explores Bowen’s non-uniform literary

criticism, and pays special attention to her typically overlooked short study, English Novelists.

Miller’s enterprise is fraught with difficulties. Bowen’s critical essays do not form a

programmatic corpus; instead, they occasionally shift in attitude toward a subject and, like her

fiction, they are replete with hesitations, contradictions, and obscure and suggestively void

statements that sometimes interfere with attempts to stabilize our interpretations of them. But

rather than see these as impasses or (as has been more common) reducing the inherent disparities

in the essays to a monolithic if comfortably alien body of beliefs and utterances, Miller probes

the multiple, interrelated dynamics and unexpected conjunctions represented in Bowen’s literary

and social criticism and reads these in combination with some of the recent revaluative criticism

of Bowen’s work to suggest aesthetic and moral concerns that span Bowen’s ideas about

representation, mass culture, and authorial political agency. Of special interest is Miller’s

discussion of the relation of Bowen’s uncertain humanism to critical attempts to refigure the

status of women’s writing in a male-dominated literary tradition. Miller also reflects on some of

the ways that Bowen’s complex and strangely linked statements regarding her own

representational intentions and preoccupations can be used to illuminate some of the intriguing

paradoxes and troubling subordinating effects of both traditional and revaluative criticism.

Following Miller’s essay, readers will find a selected bibliography compiled by Marcia

Farrell that supplements J’Nan M. Sellery’s and William O. Harris’s comprehensive

bibliography published in 1981 (Elizabeth Bowen: A Bibliography). Despite the sizable amount

of Bowen criticism published during that past two and a half decades, most is scattered among

various scholarly journals and has not been organized in any systematic way. Farrell’s
 14

bibliography reveals Bowen’s work to be the focus of much highly sophisticated literary and

cultural criticism of the past twenty-five years and forms a welcome and much needed addition

to Bowen scholarship.

As is apparent, the essays published in this issue are not intended to represent a continuity

of the writer’s endeavor, nor do they suggest the growth of an operative consciousness. While

the essays do attempt to articulate a diverse range of vital if under examined tensions in Bowen’s

narratives, they do not culminate in a single account of Bowen’s extraordinary achievement

either. Rather, by providing more carefully nuanced accounts of relationships in Bowen’s work,

relationships that have typically not been given a substantive role in interpretation, it is hoped

that these essays underscore a plea, inherent in Bowen’s work, for fine and flexible

discrimination and provisional appreciation, as they simultaneously broaden and complicate our

understanding of the many unsettling energies of her art.*

*I would like to thank the staff of Modern Fiction Studies for their help in editing this issue and

the many scholars from around the world who submitted essays for consideration. The general

vigor and acuity represented in those readings made the selection process that much more

difficult.
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Works Cited

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. New

York: St. Martin’s P, 1995.

Blodgett, Harriet. Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bowen's Novels. The Netherlands: Mouton,

1975.

Bowen, Elizabeth. Seven Winters & Afterthoughts. New York: Knopf, 1962.

Chessman, Harriet S. "Women and Language in the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen." Elizabeth

Bowen. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 123-138.

Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Oxford UP 2004.

Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2003.

Foster, R. F. Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. London:

Penguin, 1993.

Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Hanson, Claire. Hysterical Fictions: The 'Woman's Novel' in the Twentieth Century. New York:

St. Martin's P, 2000.

Heath, William. Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction to Her Novels. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,

1961.

Hewitt, Douglas. English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940. London: Longmans,

1988.

Hill, Leslie. “Poststructuralist Readings of Beckett,” Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett

Studies. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2004. 68-88.

 16

hoogland, renée c. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York UP, 1994.

hoogland, renée c. Lesbian Configurations. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Humble, Nicola., The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and

Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Lane, Jack and Brendan Clifford eds, A North Cork Anthology. Millstreet: Aubane Historical

Society, 1993.

Larbaud, Valery. “James Joyce.” Nouvelle Revue Francaise xviii (1922): 385-405. Rpt. in

James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Robert H. Deming. Vol. 1. New York: Barnes &

Noble, 1970. 252-262.

Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1990.

Lee, Hermoine. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. London: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1981.

McCormick, W. J. Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan,

LeFanu, Yeats and Bowen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993.

Muir, Edwin. “ ‘More Pricks than Kicks’.” Listener 4 July 1934: 42. Rpt. in Samuel Beckett:

The Critical Heritage. Eds. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 42-3.

Muldoon, Paul. To Ireland, I. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Pound, Ezra. “Pound on Ulysses and Flaubert.” Rpt. of excerpt from “James Joyce

et Pécuchet,” Mercure de France June 1922: 307-20 in James Joyce: The

Critical Heritage. Ed. Robert H. Deming. Vol. 1. New York: Barnes & Noble,

1970. 263-267.

Sellery, J’nan M. and William O. Harris. Elizabeth Bowen: A Bibliography. Austin, TX:

The Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, 1981.

 17

Notes

1
“Advice,” in Seven Winters and Afterthoughts, 92.
2
Although as far as is presently known, the Bowen family was originally from Wales (see

Glendinning 6-7 and Bowen Seven Winters 7), in her written statements, Bowen generally

referred to herself as “Irish;” see, for example, Foster 118. For a discussion of some of the

relations among Bowen’s national identity and her fiction as Foster understands it, see 102-22.

Corcoran also discusses relations he perceives among what he understands to be a poignant and

at times painful interstitial national identity and her fiction throughout his study.
3
Because of the competing pressures and displaced emphases in Bowen’s work, it is difficult to

determine the nature and extent of Bowen’s fiction’s responsiveness to many of the discursive

and explanatory structures that, up until recently, constrained most discussions of her work. For

example, the question of her works’ susceptibility to feminist interpretations is an especially

ticklish and intriguing one. Among her past readers, Lee is among the many who read her as an

antifeminist (229), while Phyllis Lassner has written widely about the “[feminist] struggles with

autonomy, dependence, and self-expression” that she perceives Bowen’s protagonists

experiencing (153). Readers interested in this question might also consult Hanson and

Chessman.
4
In her recent reading, renée hoogland also focuses on what she calls Bowen’s idiosyncratic and

“unclassifiable” narrative style which she links to currents of disruptive same-sex desire that she

suggests play a prominent role in Bowen’s narratives. See Lesbian Configurations 83 and ch 5.
5
See, for example, Leslie Hill’s recent discussion of that which, he suggests, writes itself in

Beckett’s narratives as irreducibly non-identical (74, 77). Interestingly, while Beckett’s stylistic

and structural subversions have been noted and have aroused both curiosity and praise since the
 18

publication of his early More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) (see, for example, Edwin Muir’s 1934

review reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage ), and Joyce’s technical peculiarities

and virtuosity have also been noted and praised since the publication of Ulysses in 1922 (see, for

example, the excerpts from Valéry Larbaud’s 1922 review and Ezra Pound’s 1922 essay

reprinted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage), the technical virtuosity of Bowen’s work has

only recently begun to attract critical attention. A critical survey along the lines of those

mentioned above concerned with the history of Bowen criticism might illuminate, among other

things, some of the historical and cultural assumptions that have militated against the recognition

of the multiple values of Bowen’s work.