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

In the following essay, Lassner delineates the defining characteristics of Bowen's ghost stories as well as her “comedies of sex and manners.”

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.

In the following excerpt, Austin discusses Bowen's last four novels—The Heat of the Day, A World of Love, The Little Girls, and Eva Trout—which reveal the writer's renewed sense of adventure and willingness to address fresh challenges.

In the following excerpt, Christensen discusses the ways Bowen establishes her characters' individual and group identities.

In the following essay, Coates examines the narrative tension in The Last September in terms of the cultural shift that occurred after World War I.

In the following essay, Coates disputes critics who characterize A World of Love as a “lovely” novel with little substance, contending that the work deals with some of the most significant concerns of twentieth-century life.

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.

In the following essay, Coates examines the essentially conservative framework of Friends and Relations, arguing that the narrative defends family and social institutions despite its characters' personal weaknesses.

In the following excerpt, Jordan explores Bowen's treatment of the psychological trauma of life during wartime in her postwar novel The Heat of the Day.

In the following essay, Caserio compares the writing styles of Paul de Man and Bowen, concluding that Bowen's works—particularly The Heat of the Day—more properly belong to the modernist movement rather than the postmodernist movement.

In the following essay, Coates maintains that Bowen's ghost stories “offer some of the most concentrated examples of her moral vision.”

In the following essay, Coates offers an overview of Bowen's moral vision as depicted in her ghost stories.

In the following excerpt, Christensen explores Bowen's use of various means of communication, both spoken and written, in her last four novels.

In the following essay, Coates finds that the usual interpretation of the ending of Eva Trout is a misreading of the work's explicit textual clues.

In the following essay, McGowan discusses Bowen's use of the garden scene in A World of Love as a way of achieving ironic contrast between innocent idealism and harsh reality.

In the following essay, Shumaker considers the role of disillusionment and alienation in “The Return,” “Summer Night,” and “Ivy Gripped the Steps.”

In the following essay, Tillinghast traces biographical influences in Bowen's fiction as allegories of innocence and experience, noting in particular the importance of displacement and abandonment among her characters.

In the following essay, Miller praises Bowen's detailed representations of women and the wide range of settings and moral concerns she treated in her novels.

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.

In the following essay, Brothers explores Bowen's use of Irish settings in her post World War II writing, particularly her autobiographical work and the 1949 novel The Heat of the Day.

In the following essay, Lassner examines the Anglo-Irish myth of the ancestral home in The Last September, focusing on the narcissim, false privelege, and fatalism it fosters.

In the following essay, Bidney views “Tears, Idle Tears” and “The Happy Autumn Fields” as Bowen's interpretation of an untitled Tennyson poems.

In the following essay, Bates elucidates the role of horror in Bowen's “Look at All Those Roses” and “The Cat Jumps.”

In the following essay, Parsons asserts that Bowen finds the setting of war-torn London “conducive to a new urban spirit, that of the female wanderer or flâneuse.”

In the following essay, Medoff examines Bowen's descriptions of life during wartime in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Bidney examines the Tennysonian context of "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The Happy Autumn Fields," deconstructing the psychological tensions of their representations of nostalgic melancholy.

In the following excerpt from his acclaimed critical study of the short story genre first published in 1948, O'Faolain gives a detailed evaluation and appreciation of Bowen's techniques of characterization, language, and construction in "Her Table Spread."

In the following excerpt, Dunleavy provides an overview of Bowen's life and short fiction.

[In] the stylishness of Elizabeth Bowen's art, one senses the dislocated child who is urgently seeking an identity as a means of survival, and who sometimes strikes that "kind of farouche note which one associates with teen-age delinquents about to break prison—that is, leave home," as her friend Sean O'Faolain said. As Miss Bowen asserts in her most famous novel, The Death of the Heart, "Illusions are art … and it is by art that we live, if we do." Th...

In the following essay, Jarrett discusses the ambiguous line between reality and fiction in Bowen's short stories.

In the following essay, Suess explores Bowen's preoccupation with the past in “Her Table Spread,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Hand in Glove.”

In the following essay, Gonzalez explores the symbolic, thematic, and technical similarities between "Her Table Spread" and James Joyce's "The Dead."

In her fiction, Miss Bowen is first of all an impressionistic writer. Since there are degress of impressionism, she might best be considered a concrete impressionist. Highly selective, she writes a taut, concentrated style which produces clear, well-defined vividness, in opposition to a vague impressionism verging on the dreamlike. Scenes and characters are rendered in few but telling strokes; here, as with other aspects of her work, Miss Bowen's ideal reader is invited to exercise his own imaginatio...

[The Last September, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout are each] concerned with a young romantic female awakening to life and love and [have] certain central scenes which focus on the imagination of these young innocents. Readers of Elizabeth Bowen have too easily concentrated on the inherent sympathy in the portrayals of these characters and have too seldom recognized that to Miss Bowen the inexorable romantic mind is doomed, as well as, in its own way, admirable. The scenes which u...

The Heat of the Day, [Elizabeth Bowen's first post-World War II] novel, is significantly not only a picture of life in England during the war but a novel divided in its setting between England and Ireland. As reflected in both autobiographical statements and in fictive constructions, it was Bowen's experience of the Second World War that led to her questioning of what was lacking in the culture and life of those persons who were both its victims and its perpetrators. Bowen now struggled with t...

In the following excerpt, O'Faolain asserts that Bowen's writing was influenced by her Anglo-Irish background and its accompanying sense of exile. O'Faolain also considers Bowen's relationship to the French novelist and short story writer Gustave Flaubert and discusses Bowen as a romantic in an anti-romantic age.

The opening of To the North is deceptive: leaving Italy is not, in itself, to be of importance. Cecilia Summers, the 'young widow' waiting for the train, is not to be the heroine. Its tone is significantly odd and ambiguous. The satirical treatment of a carefully demarcated social world is apparently anticipated, and this is borne out by the ensuing emphasis on manner and properties…. Affluent people lunch, dine, and go to parties; we are often told what they are wearing. The fashions a...

In the following essay, Hooper offers an alternate interpretation of the dreamlike action of “The Happy Autumn Fields.”

[Reading The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen] we are aware of steady progress, of increasing mastery of the form…. Her earliest stories (Encounters, 1923, and Ann Lee's, 1926,) were exercises in observation, rounded out by guesswork; she noted mannerisms and imagined their sources or followed up their implications. Her characters are meek, pompous, put-upon, confused, or contrite. She evokes gaiety only to undercut it with an ironic repudiation of its shallowness. Mockery, "the sma...

[Elizabeth Bowen] wrote with originality, bounty, vigor, style, beauty up to the last…. ["The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen"] makes several new pleasures possible…. To see anew these bright stars set among their own constellations, to read again "Mysterious Kôr" in company with "Summer Night," "The Happy Autumn Fields," "Ivy Gripped the Steps" and "The Demon Lover" is to experience in its full for...

At the end of her career Elizabeth Bowen's work was in a state of decline. Like a baseball pitcher who starts aiming for the plate, Miss Bowen in her closing years was trying to achieve by main force the drama and ambiguity and profundity that accrued naturally to her work in her finest days. A World of Love was a shadow, an anemic imitation of the best of her novels, and The Little Girls and Eva Trout were tours de force which did not succeed. (p. 142) According to her own testimony her fictional pr...

As a writer, Bowen must be evaluated on the basis of about a dozen stories and five novels—The Last September, To The North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and The Heat of the Day. (A case could be made, too, for The Little Girls.)… On the basis of her fiction alone, Bowen is as good as Evelyn Waugh, better than Ivy Compton-Burnett, Graham Greene or Henry Green. Her novels yield to Woolf's in visionary intensity but are superior to them in formal construction, variety of su...

[In The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen there] are echoes of mystery … like reverberations after an explosion that has not itself been heard. It was part of [Elizabeth Bowen's] subtlety that she dealt so often and so confidently in such shadows, in the ghosts that lurk beneath mundane reality, and in the inaccessible…. There are echoes of another kind in Elizabeth Bowen's stories, pattering through even the most English of them. These are the tell-tale hints of the Irish moo...

[There] is a discomforting tone to the first paragraph of [To the North], strongly suggesting that the material world in which it has its being is to be undermined. The knowing information about the Anglo-Italian express [traveling north] sounds a little ominous. (p. 130) Violent deaths … are symptoms of betrayal in Elizabeth Bowen's work, and mark' the passing of innocence, whether personal or national. In order that their moral significance should not be blurred by the dramatic shock ...

One of the ways the world can be divided up is into those people for whom life only began when they grew up, and those for whom childhood remains the inescapably real world. Elizabeth Bowen belonged to the latter group; as Angus Wilson says in his introduction [to The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen,] she had 'one of the principal features of the great romantics—a total connection with her own childhood'. A concentrated reading of these 79 stories, written over half a century, conf...

[Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories are] a treasure house of pleasure and mystery; even in the less successful of the seventy-nine, those that retain a "magazine" touch, some of the ghost stories and the Saki-like tales of Wise Children, there is always some fineness of phrasing, some shrewd observation (how could she have known so much?), and the strong evocation of place that is her signature. She wondered, in a manuscript she was working on at the time of her death in 1973, why peop...

Elizabeth Bowen has not written a short story as totally impressive as Lawrence's 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' or Joyce's 'The Dead', but she has produced the most consistent and extensive body of work in this form by any author writing in English…. Yet she has never been fully assimilated to the canon of modern English literature, and this failure of judgment on the critics' part is intimately connected with her mastery of the short story form. The short...

When Elizabeth Bowen died …, she was at work on a short novel, The Move-In, and a work of non-fiction, to be called Pictures and Conversations after a phrase on the first page of Alice in Wonderland. This, she explained, was not to be a full-dress autobiography, but would mingle descriptions of episodes in her own life with an account of how and why she wrote her books. Its underlying theme would be the relationship between living and writing…. Her friend and literary executor, Spencer Curtis ...

Elizabeth Bowen wrote her best stories during the 1939–45 War. None of them are conventional war-stories, but in most of them the effects of war are present, the material effects of bombs on buildings and also the effects on people's behaviour of their feelings of fear, frustration, hope, boredom and despair…. In The Demon Lover Elizabeth Bowen took on one of the most difficult tasks a writer can attempt: to make the supernatural credible. The results establish her, in my view, as one o...