Elizabeth Bowen

A Reputation in Writing

Renee Carine Hoogland

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814773284
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: LGBT Literaturkritik

Immensely popular during her lifetime, the Ango-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has since been treated as a peripheral figure on the literary map. If only in view of her prolific outputten novels, nearly eighty short stories, and a substantial body of non- fictionBowen is a noteworthy novelist. The radical quality of her work, however, renders her an exceptional one.

Surfacing in both subject matter and style, her fictions harbor a subversive potential which has hitherto gone unnoticed. Using a wide range of critical theories-from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from narratology to deconstruction-this book presents a radical re-reading of a selection of Bowen's novels from a lesbian feminist perspective.

Taking into account both cultural contexts and the author's non-fictional writings, the book's main focus is on configurations of gender and sexuality. Bowen's fiction constitutes an exploration of the unstable and destabilizing effects of sexuality in the interdependent processes of subjectivity and what she herself referred to as so-called reality.

1
Introduction: Elizabeth Bowen—A Story of Sorts

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself. . . . And like all experiences, it is added to by the power of different kinds of people, in different times, to feel and to comment and to explain.

—“Truth and Fiction”

One spends one’s life objectifying one’s inner life, and projecting one’s thought and emotion into a form—a book. Which, once one’s inside difficulties are overcome, is the exercise of an unchecked power. . . . It is hard for me (being a writer before I am a woman) to realize that anything—friendship or love especially—in which I participate imaginatively isn’t a book too. Isn’t, I mean, something I make what it is by my will that it shall be like that.

—Elizabeth Bowen to Humphrey House

The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) considered herself to be in the most eligible position to write a book about Elizabeth Bowen. She did not live to complete the set of autobiographical sketches that were to become such a book. Entitled Pictures and Conversations, her retrospective self-inscriptions were posthumously published in 1975. However, undaunted by the author’s claim to “unchecked power” over the story of her self, several persons have brought “something of their own” to Elizabeth Bowen. She has been the subject of a few (biographically informed) critical studies, one full-length and one short biographical work, and diverse memoirs. Commented on and explained, “added to by the power of different kinds of people,” the story of Elizabeth Bowen appears to have so far “withstood and outlived time.”

Bowen was not only well known, widely read, and greatly admired during her lifetime; her novels are still regularly being reissued in paperback today. If only in its prolificness and the span of time in which it was produced, her oeuvre is remarkable: in the course of nearly fifty years, she published ten novels, almost eighty short stories, a chronicle of her family, and a substantial body of (major and minor) critical and other nonfictional work. Still, her reputation as a writer has not kept up with the times, nor has her work received the serious critical attention it deserves. Often uneasily linked to other neglected women writers with whom she has little more in common than that they were contemporaries, Bowen’s name generally survives as that of a minor writer, hovering in the margins of the Great Traditions that make up the landscape of twentieth-century English literature.

Although her autobiography ultimately remained unfinished, Bowen’s life is well documented. She herself published the history of her family mentioned above, Bowen’s Court (1942), which contains a wealth of information about the cultural context into and onto which she was born, as well as a memoir of her Dublin childhood in the form of a series of short sketches, Seven Winters (1942). Whereas she did not keep a formal writer’s diary, the prefaces to several of her novels and collections of short stories, as well as numerous essays and articles, public correspondences, recorded lectures, and radio talks in which she explores her ideas concerning the art of fiction nonetheless jointly compose an illuminating account of the ways in which Bowen’s views on writing and the writer’s role in society developed, changed, and also persisted over the course of time. Victoria Glendinning’s informative biography remains the most extensive narrative of the author’s life to date.¹ Different emphases placed by literary critics on different aspects of Bowen’s life furthermore provide useful complementary insights into what is, on all accounts, a complex story about an equally complex personality. The following outline is a necessarily partial composition indebted in varying measures to these intertexts.

A Life

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born to Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin in 1899, the only child of a middle-class Protestant Unionist family. Her ancestors, the apOwens, had come from Wales with Cromwell’s army to settle in Ireland at the time of the Civil War. The first Bowen to acquire land in Ireland was a professional soldier making his home in the English province in 1653. It was his great-great-grandson who built Bowen’s Court, the remote family mansion that the author, at thirty-one, was to inherit upon her father’s death. The latter, Henry Bowen, disappointed his father by not fitting into the role ascribed to him as eldest son and heir; he chose to make his living practicing law in Dublin instead of pursuing the political and social power the Bowens had so successfully acquired. While Henry primarily emerges as a reflective, self-contained, and rather abstract intellectual, he nonetheless inherited the family tendency “towards strong will, obsessiveness, and fantasy.” In 1890, at age twenty-nine, he married Florence Colley, five years his junior and also of Anglo-Irish descent. In contrast to the Bowens’ isolated existence on their demesne in County Cork, the Colleys lived a far more sociable and cheerful life at Clontarf, near Dublin. Like her father, Bowen’s mother was the odd one out within her family. Daughter to a “dominant, dynamic, anti-intellectual, confident” mother,² Florence was “capricious, elusive, gently intent on her own thoughts.”³ They made a happy match, it seems, he being the “more thoughtful” of the two, “living by philosophy,” she the “more feeling” one, “living by temperament.” These are the terms in which Bowen, looking back, describes her parents’ marriage and her own position within it:

My father and mother must have made by their marriage, and lived in, a world of their own. This world was seldom impinged upon: times and happenings and the winter city of Dublin made round it a shadowy outer ring. Inside this world they each ruled their private kingdoms of thought, and inside it I, their first child, began to set up my own. My parents did not always communicate with each other, and I did not always communicate with them. They were both very independent of other people. I had been born, I see now, into a home at once unique and intensive, gently phenomenal.⁴

Her early days in the somewhat ethereal company of her parents resulted in a strong attachment to “places and things”: these, Bowen concedes, rather than people, “detach themselves from the stuff of my dream.”

Despite their peculiar personalities, Bowen’s parents provided their daughter with a “classic Anglo-Irish” heritage. Blended of originally diverse national strands (Norman, Scottish, Welsh, and English), the Anglo-Irish made up the ruling Ascendancy class whose power came to an end when the Irish rebellion (also known as “the Troubles”) resulted first in Partition and Home Rule (1920) and eventually in the Irish Settlement (1922). The Anglo-Irish were not in the strict sense a nationality, even after several generations of residence in Ireland. Yet as a distinct cultural group they produced their own national myths and characteristics. These went into the making of Bowen’s character as much as they found their way into her fiction. The author herself made a great point of her ancestors’ isolated position in a country where they remained geographically and politically outsiders, living their lives in their remote country houses, “in psychological closeness and under the strong rule of the family myth.” Not unlike the lives of only children, those of the Protestant landed gentry were “singular, independent, and secretive.” In their concentration around one place, Anglo-Irish families were connected by a “continuous, semiphysical dream,” above which “successive lives show their tips, their little conscious formations of will and thought.”⁵ However, as Glendinning points out, there is, in addition to “melancholy tinged with self-irony,” also something “more vital and attractive” about Anglo-Ireland: “Great style, and a verbal fluency that leaves the rest of us islands nowhere” (13). She somewhat cryptically adds that, within the “context of an enormous communicativeness,” the Anglo-Irish have a “tact and sensitivity” that is sometimes taken to a “baroque point where it almost becomes something else.” Bowen, while reticent about personal matters, in line with the norms of her race and her class, fully shared the (more Irish than Anglo-Irish) characteristic of a “natural warmth and gregariousness.” Offset against the “nervous Bowen heritage,” her gift for friendship, her hospitality, and her ability to live in the present were what she inherited from her mother’s family, the Colleys (14).

Launched into what would become a lifelong itinerant existence, the author divided her first seven years between Dublin and Bowen’s Court: summers were spent at the family estate while her father’s law practice kept the family in Dublin during winters. In view of his exacting professional obligations, Henry Bowen cannot have been a prominent presence in these early days. The relationship between mother and daughter was “very intense,” however. Though generally absent-minded, Florence was not actually vague as a mother. When Elizabeth was five, her father suffered a mental breakdown. He went to England for treatment, but when he returned the following year, his condition had not improved. His doctors recommended that Florence and Elizabeth leave, for Henry’s good. He committed himself to a mental hospital near Dublin and Elizabeth and her mother departed for the English south coast, where they were to dwell the following five years, shuttling between Edwardian seaside villas and assorted Anglo-Irish relatives. Thus thrown together, mother and daughter developed an exceedingly close relationship. The violent disruption of her primary habitat must have seriously affected the author, but the effect was apparent only in the development of a stammer that was to mark her otherwise dazzling conversation throughout her adult life. The transplantation “into a different mythology” further resulted in what Bowen describes as a “cleft between my heredity and my environment.” The Anglo-Irish, she declares, have an “undertow of the showy,” which explains why “primarily we have produced dramatists, the novel being too life-like, humdrum to do us justice”:

There is this about us: to most of the rest of the world we are semistrangers, for whom existence has something of the trance-like quality of a spectacle. As beings, we are at once brilliant and limited; our unbeat-ables . . . accordingly, have been those who best profited by that: Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett. Art is for us inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home.
Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.⁶

While her Anglo-Irish heredity remained the “more powerful,” it was the environment provided by the English landscape and social scenery that implanted in Bowen a sense of history that would become one of the hallmarks of her fiction. Arriving at an “early though conscious age” in an all but alien culture, it was as if she had taken up her part in a “non-stop historical novel.” Even if becoming a writer “knocked a good deal of nonsense out of [her] system,” there persisted a “residuum” of this “daydream”:

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not at least a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of personages “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.⁷

While accounting for Bowen’s fascination with the “dark horse” as far as her characters are concerned, the chanciness, the dislocations, and the fundamental temporary quality of her early life are also reflected in the often haphazard and violently disruptive plots of her fictions.

The romantic daydream was rudely shattered. In 1912, Henry Bowen appeared sufficiently recovered to allow his family to return to Ireland. So they did, but only to spend what proved to be their last summer together at Bowen’s Court: in September Florence died of cancer. Elizabeth was thirteen. Never completely getting over the loss, her stammer became more severe, and she was never again able to speak about her mother. Henceforth, the responsibility for her upbringing and education—which had always been intermittent—was taken over by a deputation of aunts, female Colleys living scattered about England. The bereaved girl first attended Harpenden Hall in Hertfordshire, enjoying her father’s company during the summer holidays in Ireland. While academically not a great success, Elizabeth became, during these years, a voracious reader. In 1914, she was sent to Downe House, a boarding school for girls in Kent. Reigned over by a powerful headmistress with an all-pervasive personality, Downe was to have a lasting impact. Pupils were not allowed to indulge in any form of “girlish” behavior; indeed, upon their arrival they were told that “it did not matter if [they] were happy as long as [they] were good.” Bowen later reflected that she “learnt to define happiness as a kind of inner irrational exaltation having little to do with morals one way or the other.” Dressed in a “uniform dictated down to the last detail” and constrained by a “self-imposed rigid emotional snobbishness” that precluded the “more direct means of self-expression,” the girls articulated themselves through “foibles” and “mannerisms”: these were “exaggerated most diligently.” The “ever difficult business of getting oneself across” was, the author avers, at this age “most pressing” of all: “Personality came out in patches, like damp through a wall.”⁸

The war was keenly felt inside the walls of the boarding school. Bowen remembers the “moral stress” as “appalling”: “We grew up under the intolerable obligation of being fought for, and could not fall short in character without recollecting that men were dying for us.” During these so-called formative years, the author, like her fellow students, expected to marry early, “partly because this appeared an achievement or way of making one’s mark, also from a feeling it would be difficult to settle to anything else until this was done.” While they were “not in love with each other at all constantly,” few girls “anticipated maternity with either interest or pleasure.” Indeed, Bowen admits, though some did become mothers, this “still seems inappropriate.” She goes on to suggest: “Possibly, however, we were not natural girls.”⁹ Not encouraged to be ambitious, the girls yet all expected to “distinguish” themselves in some way. The author herself took to the “curious, quick, characteristic psychological pace” of Downe, beginning to develop traits that would structure her adult character: she became observant and analytical, sympathetic and understanding, with a keen awareness of what was funny and what was tragic.¹⁰ She left Downe in the summer of 1917, instilled with an “overstrained” sense of honor and with the manners and style of a lady.

In 1918, Henry Bowen, who had continued to retain his mental health, remarried. Elizabeth was still mainly living in England but spent much time with her father and his new wife—whom she greatly liked—at Bowen’s Court. Although she had by this time started writing, she wanted to become an artist and went to the London County Council School of Art in London. After two terms, she was forced to admit that she would never be a really good painter. Bowen took a course in journalism, began sending out stories to the editors of various periodicals, and “haunted the fringes of literary London.”¹¹ Through her old headmistress she met Rose Macaulay, who, already well established as a critic and novelist at the time, recommended her work to Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the Saturday Westminster. The stories that were first printed in this periodical were later collected and published by Sidgwick and Jackson: Encounters appeared in 1923, the same year Bowen married Alan Cameron.

Cameron, an assistant secretary for education, was a talented administrator, not an intellectual. While generally considered generous and kind, he also often appeared quite out of place in the literary circles in which the young author started to move. But even if remembered by some of her friends as a rather hearty Colonel Blimp, Cameron provided Bowen with the secure emotional and home base that had practically always been lacking in her life. Their relationship constituted a true and warm friendship but was not of a sexual or passionate nature. In the first years of their marriage, Bowen wrote two more books: another collection of stories, Ann Lee’s (1926), and her first novel, The Hotel (1927). Though extremely funny, both the novel—which deals with its adolescent protagonist’s search for a sexual identity in the context of her relationship with an older woman—and most of the stories are characterized by an atmosphere of tenseness and restlessness, situated in the (interconnecting) areas of violence and sexuality: “I was beating myself against human unknowableness; in fact, I made that my subject—how many times? The stories are questions asked: many end with a shrug, a query, or, to the reader, a sort of over-to-you.”¹²

By 1925, Cameron’s work had taken the couple to Old Head-ington, near Oxford. Here Bowen met and befriended John and Susan Buchan, who in their turn established her contact with Virginia Woolf and Rosamund Lehmann. Other professionals with whom she became acquainted were the Oxford don/literary critic Lord David Cecil and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, while Maurice Bowra became an intimate friend. With her straightforward attitude, forthright opinions, her gift for intelligent conversation, wit, and satiric sensibility, Bowen was an instant success in the intellectual and artistic community of 1920s Oxford. Losing her insecurity about her appearance and sexual attractiveness, she became handsome in an unusual fashion: large-boned and tall, Bowen used her exceptional sense of style in manner, speech, and dress, her strong features acquiring rare charm and distinction. Professionally, socially, and emotionally, the author came into her own during the ten years in Oxford. In 1929, she published two books, a third collection of short stories, and her second novel, The Last September. While the stories in Joining Charles are rather uneven in quality, the novel shows how she further perfected what became an inimitable descriptive style. Again presenting female pre-adulthood in connection with the figure of a powerful older woman, the novel fully established the exploration of female sexual identity as one of the author’s central themes. Even so, as Glendinning correctly points out, in Bowen’s early fiction, “passion and terror lie beneath, partly controlled, partly controlling” (67). Its essential quality is what the author herself was to call with respect to Jane Austen’s work, “life with the lid on.” Rather than representing a limitation, however, she argues that her famous predecessor successfully “dispels . . . the fallacy that life with the lid off . . . is necessarily more interesting than life with the lid on.”¹³

The following year, Henry Bowen became ill again. He died in May 1930, leaving the responsibility for Bowen’s Court and the management of the estate in the...