SOURCE: Hanson, Clare. “Little Girls and Large Women: Representations of the Female Body in Elizabeth Bowen's Later Fiction.” In Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane, pp. 185-98. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Hanson reassesses Bowen's oeuvre, particularly her representations of young girls and older women, using the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to provide a new understanding of Bowen's work.

Elizabeth Bowen's fate has been typical of that of ‘the woman writer’. Her books were both popular and critically acclaimed in their day, but after her death in 1973, her reputation suffered a decline. Her status became that of a ‘minor’ writer, haunting about the margins of the literary canon, and her later work, in particular, was disparaged. Hermione Lee, for example, had this to say of The Little Girls (1964) in her study Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation...