SOURCE: Parsons, Deborah L. “Souls Astray: Elizabeth Bowen's Landscape of War.” Women: A Cultural Review 8, no. 1 (spring 1997): 24-32.

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.”

Walking in the darkness of the nights of six years (darkness which transformed a capital city into a network of inscrutable canyons) one developed new bare alert senses, with their own savage warnings and notations.

—Bowen 1952:223.

Elizabeth Bowen's war-time London is at once a place and a non-place: a site of dislocation and displacement, inhabited by wanderers, people who have lost both homes and identities in the disruption of war. It is also a particularly female world, populated by working girls, widows and wives whose husbands have gone to the front. The few male figures that do appear are emasculated men, too...