SOURCE: Miller, Jane. “Re-reading Elizabeth Bowen.” Raritan 20, no. 1 (summer 2000): 17-31.

In the following essay, Miller praises Bowen's detailed representations of women and the wide range of settings and moral concerns she treated in her novels.

The centenary of Elizabeth Bowen's birth fell neatly into the last year of the twentieth century and was celebrated with a reissuing of almost all her work in an ugly paperback edition, which is better than nothing. The books come with rather haphazardly chosen introductions, all flattering, though few of them quite avoid the sort of condescension she must have grown used to from even her most admiring critics. The current availability of so much of her writing—ten novels, a selection of essays, letters, and reviews, a collection of all the short stories that were published in seven separate volumes during her lifetime, her history of her family and of the house...