IT has become the fate of Elizabeth Bowen to be mentioned in the same breath as a clutch of other writers of the English novel of manners, accompanied by a respectful nod, and passed over. Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann and Katherine Mansfield seem to be her habitual bedfellows; to these, more recently, have been added the names of her Anglo Irish precursors: Maria Edgeworth, Sheridan le Fanu and Somerville and Ross. Extricating Bowen from these literary taxonomies will be the business of the group of academics who are meeting in University College Cork tomorrow for two days' discussion, under the banner: "Elizabeth Bowen: an Irish Perspective".
Bowen's Irishness, or more specifically, her Anglo Irishness, is an inevitable theme for commentators: she knew what it was to be English in Ireland and Irish in England. Born at the turn of the century into an Anglo Welsh Ascendancy family, she spent her earliest years shuttling between Dublin and Bowen's Court, the 18th century ancestral home in Co Cork which she later inherited.
When she was seven years old, she moved with her mother to Kent, after her father's psychological breakdown, which was followed by her mother's death when Elizabeth was 13. After her schooldays in Kent she returned briefly to Bowen's Court, before moving to London. This constant movement between Ireland and England and its consequent sense of displacement remained with Bowen and permeates her fiction, as does an awareness of the ambivalent relationship between the two countries, which was, as one of her characters says: "a mixture of showing off and suspicion, nearly as bad as sex".
Nowhere in her work is this relationship better captured than in The Last September (1929), her second novel and her most impressive achievement, which records, with perception, subtlety and a great deal of quiet humour, life in an Irish country house, in 1920. It is an atmospheric evocation of a social order under threat, as the characters pursue their round of dinner dances and tennis parties in the midst of the Black and Tan war, which finally destroys both the house and, with the death of her soldier lover, the hopes of the young heroine.
A novel of sensibility, it introduces themes that were to recur in Bowen's work: a sensitive young girl, susceptible to the influence of an older more worldly woman; compromises and disappointments in love, and the over riding symbolic presence of a house, in this case the Big House of Anglo Irish literature. But there is no simple linen and lawn nostalgia here; the 19 year old Lois is stifled by the snobbery and enervation of her milieu, which even affects her ability to express herself.
Although later Bowen wrote that this novel had a "deep, clouded, spontaneous source", she resisted being identified too closely with Lois, always insisting on the separation of the writer's emotions and imagination.
"I am dead against art's being self expression," she wrote in the 1950s. "I see an inherent failure in any story, which does not detach itself from the author.
In her sympathetic, discerning biogrpahy, Victoria Glendinning suggests that Bowen's marriage at the age of 24 to the educationalist Alan Cameron did much to compensate for the loss of her parents and the instability of her childhood. The early years of their marriage were spent in Oxford in the 1930s, where Elizabeth became an enthusiastic hostess and enjoyed herself hugely, negotiating a path between the worlds of the university and Bloomsbury, with which she was associated, but did not wholly identify.
Marriage for her did not preclude a succession of love affairs, and it was her involvement with the scholar Humphrey House that she drew on in The House in Paris, an elegantly constructed exploration of death, sex, childhood, time and repressed passion, injected with a Gothic intensity by its extreme melodrama.
THE character of the ailing matriarch, Mme Fisher, who lies in an upstairs room, controlling and destroying the lives around her is the stuff of nightmare while Max, the enigmatic object of three women's desire, is Bronte's Mr Rochester revived a fantasy figure, who is given an appropriately lurid suicide scene. With its neat patterning, its pairing of characters, and the tight meshing of past and present, the novel demonstrates Bowen's concern with form.
"It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden," Bowen wrote in middle age. Loss of innocence is tackled again in the novel for which she became best known, but which she herself liked least, The Death of the Heart (1935) the story of the disillusionment of a gauche 16 year old orphan, Portia, at the hands of her sophisticated London relatives. While she was probably right to say, later, that this novel was really an over extended short story, in the scenes set in a seaside resort it gives full rein to Bowen's gift for social comedy usually at the expense of the English suburban lower middle classes, exhibiting, as Roy Foster has pointed out, a characteristic Anglo Irish snobbery.
Bowen remained in London during the second World War, working as an air raid warden, living beside Regent's Park. Some of her best short stories are set in London during the Blitz and capture the sense of dislocation that affected so many people at that time. For Bowen, the war was also an opportunity to reappraise her relationship with Ireland, as she made many visits both to Bowen's Court and to Dublin, and provided confidential reports on the condition and morale of neutral Ireland to the British Ministry of Information.
The novel which came out of these wartime experiences in both countries, The Heat of the Day (1949), was a new departure for her, as it combined a spy story and a psychological thriller, with elements of social comedy. Despite its vivid evocation of the Blitz and its succession of displaced people haunted by ghosts from the past, which deeply moved many of Bowen's contemporaries, the novel is flawed by weak characterisation and an overwrought, strained melodrama.
The war, in fact, posed an artistic problem for Bowen, since "these days", she said "one feels rather a revulsion against psychological intricacies for their own sake". Yet, these were precisely what she wrote about best, and her attempts to forsake "mere" sensibility for more narrative driven approach was not a success. In her later work, too, her idiosyncratic style began to topple over into self parody.
At its most extreme, her convoluted syntax suggests a writer whose native language is not English. Its inversions, double negatives, placement of adverb before verb, and verb at the end of the sentence, makes it sometimes necessary to read her sentences aloud to allow the sense to emerge, while her use of ellipses, and attenuated snatches of dialogue can seem very mannered. ("Absolutely," he said with fervour, "not.")
For all her preoccupation with style and decorum, her Austenesque espousal of "life with the lid on", there is a febrile intensity and emotional power in Bowen's best work that provides an unsettling tension and explains her appeal to adolescent girls, who "like", as she wrote, "to have loud chords struck on them". Yet, her themes are unquestionably adult, and treated with considerable complexity: the loss of faith and of trust and, above all, betrayal. An authorial comment from The Death of the Heart identifies this as her central, perennial subject: "One's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist only when they are betrayed, or worse still, when one betrays them, does one realise their power."
