SOURCE: Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls and Eva Trout.” In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, pp. 164-86. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Wyatt-Brown contends that The Little Girls and Eva Trout, often dismissed by critics due to Bowen's conservative views, are actually nontraditional works of fiction that anticipate the conventions of postmodernism.

Since her death in 1973, Elizabeth Bowen's formidable novels have not received much attention from theoretically inclined academics. As a result, no one has noted that her final two works, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, move the novel in the direction of postmodern experimentation. The innovations of the Anglo-Irish novelist have been ignored for several reasons. As Howard Moss explained in 1979, “The wrong reputation can be as deadly as none.” For some...