SOURCE: "The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1965, pp. 53-9.

In the following excerpt, Saul faults Bowen's short stories, including those contained within The Demon Lover, and Other Stories for their "brittle" and "self-consciously sophisticated" characters and thematic weaknesses, although he regards "The Demon Lover" as one of her better works.

One of the unhappy feelings hard to shake off in reflecting on the short stories of the Irishwoman Elizabeth (Dorothea Cole) Bowen (Mrs. Alan Charles Cameron; b. 1899) is that of their essentially un-Irish quality and character: in fast, occasional prolixity seems almost the only thing possibly suggestive of Irish roots, and that implies merely negative identification. Even Miss Bowen's theorizing (see the preface to her Early Stories)—"a story, if it is to be a story, must have a psychological turning-point"—is in a sense un-Irish: the racial inclination is basically toward...