In praise of Elizabeth Bowen, by Roy Foster

Elizabeth Bowen’s prose is supercharged, spring-loaded, allusive and often very funny; novels such as The Death of the Heart and The House in Paris strike straight to the core of things, particularly where children are concerned. She had the consummate novelist’s gift of being able (in her own words) “to open and shut time like a fan”. She writes about Ireland with a kind of controlled passion, both in her autobiographical works (Bowen’s Court, Seven Winters) and in novels like The Last September, while her short stories are masterly, particularly those written (and often set) in London during the Blitz as is her marvellous novel about wartime and spying, The Heat of the Day.

Despite a life lived between London and Cork her first identification, as she repeatedly said, was as an Irish novelist (she found her nationality “a highly disturbing emotion”). The great novelist of displacement, her own “placing” is now firmly in the Irish fictional canon.

There are so many powerful Irish women writers; I would also nominate the underestimated Patricia Lynch, who is far more than a children’s writer, and – if I can have two O’Briens – both Kate and Edna.

"The wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. Strangers saying 'Good night, good luck' to each other at street corners, as the sky first blanched then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown."
From The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen

"It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning; while to the north the neck of mountains before Mount Isabel was frightfully outlined. The roads in unnatural dusk ran dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a tree, brushed pale by wind from the flames, not a cabin pressed in despair to the bosom of the night, not a gate too starkly visible but had its place in the design of order and panic. At Danielstown, halfway up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the steps, the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace."
From The Last September, by Elizabeth Bowen

Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at Hertford College, Oxford