SOURCE: Shumaker, Jeanette. “Bruised Boys and ‘Fallen’ Women: The Need for Rescue in Short Stories by Elizabeth Bowen.” The South Carolina Review 32, no. 1 (fall 1999): 88-98.

In the following essay, Shumaker considers the role of disillusionment and alienation in “The Return,” “Summer Night,” and “Ivy Gripped the Steps.”

John Halperin writes of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen that “Like James, she often took as her subject something only half glimpsed or understood, and thus suggestive” (45). Along similar lines, Richard Tillinghast states that “Not uncommonly in Bowen's work, something that is never mentioned—or that is alluded to ten pages later—may be the most important thing that is going on” (27). In short stories such as “The Return” (1923), “Summer Night” (1941), and “Ivy Gripped the Steps” (1945), Bowen shows characters under the influence of illusions of which they are only partially aware. “The Return” and “Summer Night” concern adulteresses who cherish the...