Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking

Our ideal therefore, must be a language as clear as glassthe 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
Bowens work in the Aubane Historical Societys 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 Bowens 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

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 Bowens national identity reveals -- at the very least -- a highly ambivalent response
to the various pressures and threats that Bowens 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 Lanes and Cliffords enterprise centers around the single task of
finding an expedient accommodation, one, that is, that would harmonize the competing claims
that Bowens history presents. Yet rather than dispensing with the problems Bowens 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
Bowens present to conventional notions of definition, identity, and fit, and their conflicted
solution leaves open the question of whether Bowens 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.

For some time, there have been degrees of doubt about Bowens 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,
Bowens 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 twentiethcentury 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 Heaths 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 Bowens aesthetic. Contending that Bowens
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 actualitytransmutations of the literal (18, 19, 22). Other readers, including
Hermione Lee, argued for Bowens recognition as a modern writer because of her analysis of

dislocation, unease, and betrayal. Like Blodgett, Lee was especially concerned with previous
restrictive classifications of Bowen and saw in Bowens 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 Bowens 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]
backon 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 Fanus 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 Bowens
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 Bowens narratives and have sought for ways of accounting for the multiple
ways that her narratives stray across boundaries and resist neat identifications. Indeed, recent

criticism has focused almost explicitly on the diverse ways that Bowens 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 Bowens fictions refuse to be
contained within a single frame of reference and in some cases confoundthe literary theories
brought to bear upon it (3,xi). Focusing on the often ungainly and florid clashes between
literary forms seen in Bowens narratives, Ellmann discusses ways that Bowens 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 Bowens 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 Bowens work, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, citing
her works egregious unconventionality, argue against all previous readings of her work, and
suggest instead that Bowens fictional narratives
are open to fundamental rereadingswhich at once transform the
status and importance of Bowens 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 Bowens under examined and undervalued novel Eva Trout or Changing
Scenes, they suggest that Bowens work undermines the epistemological foundations of the

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 Bowens narratives are often felt to be urgent demands to be recognized as
irreducibly other, Bowens 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 Bowens art.
While Samuel Becketts work, to which Bowens is increasingly and favorably compared, was
recognized as non-identical from the start and continues to be recognized and read as nonidentical,5 because the identical and the non-identical in Bowens work insist, at times
hyperbolically, on their mutual entanglement, her work challenges us, in ways that Becketts
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, Bowens 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 Bowens style, a pressure that
places her work, as Paul Muldoon suggests, along with Joyces and Becketts, 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 Bowens work both invoke and discredit a

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 Bowens 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, Bowens 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 Bowens work, to some of the ways
that the work strays over boundaries and doesnt 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 Bowens 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

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 Bowens 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 Bowens art. In the first essay, Unstable Compounds: Bowens
Beckettian Affinities, Sinead Mooney begins the work of setting aside the edifice of social
realism that has obstructed critical efforts to represent Bowens 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 Becketts depleted moribunds parallels to Bowens many suspended protagonists
discountenance classic narrative form. Particularly useful is Mooneys exploration of the
suggestive correspondences apparent in two of the writers unreadable novels, Becketts Watt
and Bowens Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. While Bowens 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 ofWatt, 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 readers confidence in hermetic structures of meaning.

Jed Estys essay, Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopmental
Plot, reconsiders one of Bowens 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 novels 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 novels non-identical formal principles
than to Bowens imagined emotional affiliations and political intentions in order to explore how
the novels 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 novels
proliferating anticlimaxes and Bowens representation of her protagonists 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 Bowens 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 Bowens 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 Bowens Early Fiction, Elizabeth
Cullingford suggests that Bowens 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 Bowens 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 Bowens characters, both onlys and siblings. While Bowens 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 Bowens work concerns the
incompletely resolved representation of material reality. As a few of Bowens more recent
readers have noted, while Bowens 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 Bowens 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 readers 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 Bowens fiction, most of Bowens
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 Bowens Narrative Materializes, such
readings overlook the ways that places and things in Bowens 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 Bowens 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, Inglesbys reading illustrates difficulties inherent in interpreting narratives such as
Bowens that often but not always mock nostalgia for permanence and stability, as she links the
inconsistencies and paradoxes in Bowens fluctuating narrative style to difficulties experienced
by both Bowens narrators and Bowens readers inherent in controlling meaning. At the same
time, Inglesbys essay suggests a number of fruitful areas for future study including the relation
of Bowens 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 Bowens irregular
and inconsistent representation of the inanimate to issues of gender, sexuality, and political and
national identity.
The two final essays explore aspects of Bowens critically disesteemed nonfiction. Like
her fiction, Bowens 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 Bowens 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 Bowens Court, it has rarely received sustained critical
attention. However, in her essay, That Eternal Now: Memory and Subjectivity in Elizabeth
Bowens 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 Bowens relation to literary
modernism and literary realism. One of the most important aspects of Stewarts 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.

13

In the final essay, The Impersonal Personal: Value, Voice and Agency in Elizabeth
Bowens Literary and Social Criticism, Brook Miller explores Bowens non-uniform literary
criticism, and pays special attention to her typically overlooked short study, English Novelists.
Millers enterprise is fraught with difficulties. Bowens 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 Bowens literary
and social criticism and reads these in combination with some of the recent revaluative criticism
of Bowens work to suggest aesthetic and moral concerns that span Bowens ideas about
representation, mass culture, and authorial political agency. Of special interest is Millers
discussion of the relation of Bowens uncertain humanism to critical attempts to refigure the
status of womens writing in a male-dominated literary tradition. Miller also reflects on some of
the ways that Bowens 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 Millers essay, readers will find a selected bibliography compiled by Marcia
Farrell that supplements JNan M. Sellerys and William O. Harriss 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. Farrells

14

bibliography reveals Bowens 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 writers 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 Bowens
narratives, they do not culminate in a single account of Bowens extraordinary achievement
either. Rather, by providing more carefully nuanced accounts of relationships in Bowens work,
relationships that have typically not been given a substantive role in interpretation, it is hoped
that these essays underscore a plea, inherent in Bowens 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.

15

Works Cited
Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. New
York: St. Martins 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, rene c. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York UP, 1994.
hoogland, rene 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 Pcuchet, 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, Jnan 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

Although as far as is presently known, the Bowen family was originally from Wales (see

Seven Winters and Afterthoughts, 92.

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 Bowens 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 Bowens work, it is difficult to

determine the nature and extent of Bowens fictions 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 Bowens protagonists
experiencing (153). Readers interested in this question might also consult Hanson and
Chessman.
4

In her recent reading, rene hoogland also focuses on what she calls Bowens idiosyncratic and

unclassifiable narrative style which she links to currents of disruptive same-sex desire that she
suggests play a prominent role in Bowens narratives. See Lesbian Configurations 83 and ch 5.
5

See, for example, Leslie Hills recent discussion of that which, he suggests, writes itself in

Becketts narratives as irreducibly non-identical (74, 77). Interestingly, while Becketts 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 Muirs 1934
review reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage ), and Joyces technical peculiarities
and virtuosity have also been noted and praised since the publication of Ulysses in 1922 (see, for
example, the excerpts from Valry Larbauds 1922 review and Ezra Pounds 1922 essay
reprinted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage), the technical virtuosity of Bowens 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 Bowens work.