This book offers a critical account of Elizabeth Bowen, a significant 20th-century Irish writer still too little known and appreciated. It considers her novels, short stories, essays, and family history, showing how her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. The book explores Bowen's adaptation of Irish Protestant Gothic in relation to the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, especially the London Blitz. It reads her explorations of childhood as a response both to Henry James and to the European novel of adultery. Focusing on the i ... More

This book offers a critical account of Elizabeth Bowen, a significant 20th-century Irish writer still too little known and appreciated. It considers her novels, short stories, essays, and family history, showing how her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. The book explores Bowen's adaptation of Irish Protestant Gothic in relation to the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, especially the London Blitz. It reads her explorations of childhood as a response both to Henry James and to the European novel of adultery. Focusing on the ideas of return and reflex, it reads the presence of the supernatural, and of other kinds of haunting, in her work in relation to concepts drawn from both Freud and T. S. Eliot. The book also makes use of non-fictional materials in its interpretations, notably, Bowen's wartime reports from neutral Ireland and the diaries of her wartime lover Charles Ritchie. The intention is to demonstrate the ways in which Bowen's writing merges personal story with public history. The book's radical readings, which depend on a wealth of original research, propose that Bowen is as important to 20th-century literary studies as her much better-known Irish Protestant fellow writer, Samuel Beckett.