The Heat of the Day, [Elizabeth Bowen's first post-World War II] novel, is significantly not only a picture of life in England during the war but a novel divided in its setting between England and Ireland. As reflected in both autobiographical statements and in fictive constructions, it was Bowen's experience of the Second World War that led to her questioning of what was lacking in the culture and life of those persons who were both its victims and its perpetrators. Bowen now struggled with the questions that Yeats and T. S. Eliot had struggled with earlier: how in an age without belief or tradition can the individual live with purpose? how can the individual be kept from a solipsistic working of his selfish will upon the rest of mankind? where is to be found a standard for value judgment other than the pure numbers of the mob? since man's reason does not curb his cruelties, how foster his sympathetic identification with his fellow man?
The similarity in the landscapes which Bowen makes explicit in her autobiographical writings seems to have suggested the importance of the life she had known and loved as a child. The landscape which Bowen emphasizes for that heredity—the ruins surrounding the homes of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy—prefigures the landscape of Bowen's environment, the crumbling world of Europe after two world wars. (pp. 129-30)
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