Volume

“Shadows are light’s language,” writes Elizabeth Bowen; “[w]ithout them, light could be meaningless, overpowering!” (Bowen, People, Places, Things 43) Light and its effects are everywhere in Bowen’s novels and short stories, rapturously invoked in synaesthetic terms: light is like water, like a veil; light is atmosphere, light is being. Light has the nostalgic power to transport the subject to a different time and place, or to create the experience of the subject in the present. In Bowen’s very first essay, “Modern Lighting” (1928), she points out that the experience of light is as “personal as a perception” (PPT 26). Our sensitivity to light she calls our “affectability”-- what a psychoanalyst might call the affective power of light. Light qualifies our experience of the world, and in Bowen’s work, is a primary mode by which her heroines understand their place in it. In this paper, I examine the way that Elizabeth Bowen’s representation of visual sensation is linked to the self-determination and self-awareness of the young women in her early novels. We will see their moments of self-actualization to be ineluctably bound up with vision--limited vision, impaired vision, enhanced vision, mistaken visions--and with the applied visual activity of reading. Bowen emphasizes the narrative aspect of her heroines’ lives; that is, the way that they are participants in a text which has already been written for them, in which they are cast as the ingenue, and expected to behave in accordance with that generic category. The bildungsroman plot in Bowen’s novels allows her heroines to gain an awareness of this reified aspect of their lives, and so to arrive, eventually, at a point of recognition that positions them both inside and outside the text, looking at their lives both from within and without. This displacement allows them a new angle of vision from which to consider their decisions.

The Elizabeth Bowen Review, 2018

Orbis Litterarum 67,4, 2012

This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. First, the essay analyses the construction of these images in terms of style, arguing that Bowen’s idiosyncratic combination of a variety of figural tropes and narrative strategies results in a strong but highly ambivalent bond between house and character, whereby houses at once illuminate and efface their inhabitants. Second, while most critics have interpreted Bowen’s houses in the context of her Anglo-Irish background as emblems of a lost tradition and identity, this essay argues that Bowen’s houses also evoke other contexts, in particular the celebration of the domestic in interwar Britain. Through a detailed reading of several short stories, it shows how Bowen both satirises this idealisation of the home and uncovers its far more awful reality, especially for the ‘daughters’ and ‘ladies’ of the house. A final part considers the isolation that marks nearly all of Bowen’s houses and opposes it to her characterisation of the ideal house as a place of hospitality and recognition.

Women: A Cultural Review, 2011

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Journal of British Studies, 2011

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 2010