SOURCE: Coughlan, Patricia. “Women and Desire in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen.” In Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing, edited by Éibhear Walshe, pp. 103-34. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Coughlan traces the representation of women's mutual attraction in Bowen's later novels.

‘She abandoned me. She betrayed me.’

‘Had you a sapphic relationship?’

‘What?’

‘Did you exchange embraces of any kind?’

‘No. She always was in a hurry.’

Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout, p. 184

The array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues of homo/heterosexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that available to, say, Proust. … Most moderately to well-educated Western people in this century seem to share a similar understanding of homosexual definition, independent of whether they themselves are gay or straight, homophobic or antihomophobic. … That understanding is … organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence. … Enduringly since at least...