When Elizabeth Bowen died …, she was at work on a short novel, The Move-In, and a work of non-fiction, to be called Pictures and Conversations after a phrase on the first page of Alice in Wonderland. This, she explained, was not to be a full-dress autobiography, but would mingle descriptions of episodes in her own life with an account of how and why she wrote her books. Its underlying theme would be the relationship between living and writing…. Her friend and literary executor, Spencer Curtis Brown, has wisely allowed these few literary remains to appear. Of The Move-In, only ten pages survive, lively and suggestive enough to tantalize. Of Pictures and Conversations, there remain two completed chapters, the start of a third and a projected outline of the rest. These do more than tantalize—they satisfy; and they also sadden, because it is clear that the finished result...