Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: Introduction by John Banville (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

The British spirit holds an eternal fascination for world-wide audienced. With their unique, damp-climate characteristics they people the novels and short stories of Elizabeth Bowen, an upper-class Anglo-Irish author whose long writing career spanned four decades. In fact, the stories in this collection are divided chronologically, beginning with her early stories from the roaring twenties and thirties through the war and its aftermath. Although Bowen masterfully conveys the haughty elegance and self-absorption of the upper classes, it is with the middle and working class characters that she is at her best. But perhaps that view reflects a personal inability on my part to care about the petty concerns of the elite and an ease with identifying with what motivates the average person living in the twentieth century. Of her early stories, my favorite was “The Shadowy Third” in which a second wife of a quite average man is haunted with the thought that their happiness was arrived at via the unhappiness of the first wife, who may have died of a broken heart. The twenties also saw the story of a recently married woman happily living with her sisters- and mother-in-law. In “Joining Charles,” Mrs. Charles dreads leaving the household to join her husband. Subtily, Bowen reveals the nature of the title character and hints at the subject of abuse. One of Bowen’s strongest suits is her characterization of the inner life of children, as in “The Visitor,” in which a young lad is being entertained by well-meaning family friends while his mother lies at home dying. While the author seems to be able to plumb the depth of her child characters’ thoughts, the adult characters in the stories are significantly at a loss to do the same. If, as Bowen writes in “A Day in the Dark,” the last story of this volume, “Literature, once one knows it, drains away some of the shockingness out of life,” then the detailed portraits of characters in this 79-story volume, persons at once unique and universal, prepare the reader well for meeting much of the “shockingness” of everyday life. Her carefully crafted details of setting as well as of character provide her readers with all the they need to understand the time, place, and people of which she writes.

Ah, the Brits! You just gotta love ‘em. WIth their unique, damp-climate characteristics, they people the novels and short stories of Elizabeth Bowen, an upper-class Anglo-Irish author whose long writing career spanned four decades. In fact, the stories in this collection are divided chronologically, beginning with her early stories from the roaring twenties and thirties through the war and its aftermath. Although Bowen masterfully conveys the haughty elegance and self-absorption of the upper classes, it is with the middle and working class characters that she is at her best. But perhaps that view reflects a personal inability on my part to care about the petty concerns of the elite and an ease with identifying with what motivates the average person living in the twentieth century. Of her early stories, my favorite was “The Shadowy Third” in which a second wife of a quite average man is haunted with the thought that their happiness was arrived at via the unhappiness of the first wife, who may have died of a broken heart. The twenties also saw the story of a recently married woman happily living with her sisters- and mother-in-law. In “Joining Charles,” Mrs. Charles dreads leaving the household to join her husband. Subtily, Bowen reveals the nature of the title character and hints at the subject of abuse. One of Bowen’s strongest suits is her characterization of the inner life of children, as in “The Visitor,” in which a young lad is being entertained by well-meaning family friends while his mother lies at home dying. While the author seems to be able to plumb the depth of her child characters’ thoughts, the adult characters in the stories are significantly at a loss to do the same. If, as Bowen writes in “A Day in the Dark,” the last story of this volume, “Literature, once one knows it, drains away some of the shockingness out of life,” then the detailed portraits of characters in this 79-story volume, persons at once unique and universal, prepare the reader well for meeting much of the “shockingness” of everyday life. Her carefully crafted details of setting as well as of character provide her readers with all the they need to understand the time, place, and people of which she writes.