At the end of her career Elizabeth Bowen's work was in a state of decline. Like a baseball pitcher who starts aiming for the plate, Miss Bowen in her closing years was trying to achieve by main force the drama and ambiguity and profundity that accrued naturally to her work in her finest days. A World of Love was a shadow, an anemic imitation of the best of her novels, and The Little Girls and Eva Trout were tours de force which did not succeed. (p. 142)

According to her own testimony her fictional process, the manner of her creating, always started with place. Other novelists might begin with a concept of character or with a germ of a story or with a human situation that they feel compelled to probe. But with Elizabeth Bowen there was first the deliberate limning of the landscape or the drawing-room or the...