SOURCE: Lassner, Phyllis. “‘The Ghostly Origins of Female Character’ and ‘Comedies of Sex and Manners’.” In Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 10-40. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

In the following essay, Lassner delineates the defining characteristics of Bowen's ghost stories as well as her “comedies of sex and manners.”

Ghosts have grown up. Far behind lie their clanking and moaning days; they have laid aside their original bag of tricks—bleeding hands, luminous skulls. … Their manifestations are, like their personalities, oblique and subtle, perfectly calculated to get the modern person under the skin. … Ghosts exploit the horror latent behind reality.¹

Bowen's ghost stories are marked by the influence of Anglo-Irish writers like Sheridan LeFanu and Maria Edgeworth, who used the myths and history of the Protestant Ascendancy to explore the oppressive hold it maintained over its heirs.² In the work of these earlier writers, haunting...