SOURCE: Lee, Hermione. “The Bend Back: A World of Love (1955), The Little Girls (1964) and Eva Trout (1968).” In Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, pp. 189-212. London: Vision Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Lee examines Bowen's final series of novels—A World of Love, The Little Girls, and Eva Trout—maintaining that all three deal with the sense of uncertainty and detachment from emotional life that Bowen finds characteristic in post-World War II society.

What fails in the air of our present-day that we cannot breathe it?

The ‘awful illumination’ of war confirmed, on a vast scale, Elizabeth Bowen's personal vision of a denatured and dispossessed civilisation. ‘There's been a stop in our senses and in our faculties that's made everything around us so much dead matter.’ ‘How are we to live without natures? … So much flowed through people; so little flows through us … All we can do is imitate love...