Bowen, Elizabeth | Phyllis Lassner (essay date 1991)
Phyllis Lassner (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Lassner, Phyllis. “‘The Ghostly Origins of Female Character’ and ‘Comedies of Sex and Manners’.” In Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 10-40. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
[In the following essay, Lassner delineates the defining characteristics of Bowen's ghost stories as well as her “comedies of sex and manners.”]
Ghosts have grown up. Far behind lie their clanking and moaning days; they have laid aside their original bag of tricks—bleeding hands, luminous skulls. … Their manifestations are, like their personalities, oblique and subtle, perfectly calculated to get the modern person under the skin. … Ghosts exploit the horror latent behind reality.1
Bowen's ghost stories are marked by the influence of Anglo-Irish writers like Sheridan LeFanu and Maria Edgeworth, who used the myths and history of the Protestant...
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