Elizabeth Bowen Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Martin Bidney

SOURCE: "Nostalgic Narcissism in Comic and Tragic Perspectives: Elizabeth Bowen's Two Fictional Reworkings of a Tennyson Lyric," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 59-68.

In the following essay, Bidney examines the Tennysonian context of "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The Happy Autumn Fields," deconstructing the psychological tensions of their representations of nostalgic melancholy.

"Tennis, anyone?" is the opening of Peter De Vries's delightful "Touch and Go (With a Low Bow to Elizabeth Bowen)," and its closing words are "Tennyson, anyone?" Surprisingly, "in conversation Miss Bowen said that she had not realized," until she read this parody, "how often she relied on Victorian poetry for her titles (e.g., 'Tears, Idle Tears,' 'The Happy Autumn Fields,' etc.)," according to William Heath's report in 1961. Bowen was not necessarily disingenuous: the creative process arises from deep levels of preverbal awareness; memory is unreliable; influences operate deviously (creating and...
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