"The Shorter Fiction," in Elizabeth Bowen, Twayne Publishers, 1989, pp. 70-86.

Here, Austin explores Bowen's writing process and the author's use of place and mood in her work, especially "The Demon Lover. "

Elizabeth Bowen clearly enjoyed working back and forth between novels and shorter works. She has implied that the two forms may reflect alternate selves. Noting the amount of fantasy in her stories, something she eschews in her novels, she says,

If I were a short story writer only, I might well seem to be out of balance. But recall, more than half of my life is under the steadying influence of the novel, with its calmer, stricter, more orthodox demands: into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings."

In...