SOURCE: Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls and Eva Trout.” In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, pp. 164-86. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Wyatt-Brown contends that The Little Girls and Eva Trout, often dismissed by critics due to Bowen's conservative views, are actually nontraditional works of fiction that anticipate the conventions of postmodernism.]

Since her death in 1973, Elizabeth Bowen's formidable novels have not received much attention from theoretically inclined academics. As a result, no one has noted that her final two works, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, move the novel in the direction of postmodern experimentation. The innovations of the Anglo-Irish novelist have been ignored for several reasons. As Howard Moss explained in 1979, “The wrong reputation can be as deadly as none.” For some time the academy has denigrated works belonging in the tradition of the comedy of manners. Such efforts seem snobbish in our egalitarian and ethnically conscious society. Unless evidence of subversion or overtly feminist undertones appears among the social nuances, writers like Bowen are not taken seriously. Her generally conservative political and social attitudes, as John Hildebidle reports, can be inferred by “the frequency and judgmental force with which the word ‘vulgar’ enters into her fiction.” Moreover, those modern critics who do not object to her upper-class prejudices have little understanding of the effect of aging upon her choice of material and style. As a result, they find it difficult to interpret her least traditional fiction.¹

Bowen's fiction resists superficial reading. In particular her final two experimental novels, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, which should have attracted the attention of theorists, are so complex that they bewilder even the wariest of readers. One often has the uneasy feeling of being an intruder into Bowen's private world, lost without a guide. Prior critics have attempted to sort out the confusing strains in Bowen's early fiction with some success but have generally have left the later works alone.²

Throughout Bowen's career, the dominant themes in her fiction involve the interaction of marriage and society, the subjects of the comedy of manners. Yet at no point is Bowen's fiction merely conservative or old-fashioned. For example, Hildebidle stresses the conservative, “unmistakable consistency” of her writing but also concludes quite accurately that the novelist's suffering caused her to convert the conventions of social comedy from a comedy of manners to a “modern tragedy of manners.” Bowen's fiction contains at least two contradictory strands: she juxtaposes the asocial and psychotic with the everyday and the ordinary. Like the American novelist Walker Percy, whose middle-class, highly educated characters are “lost in the cosmos”—to borrow the title of one of his books—most of Bowen's adolescents and sensitive adults feel the same way. Indeed, in common with most of the imaginative and innovative practitioners of social comedy in this century—E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, Molly Keane, Anita Brookner, and Elizabeth Jolley—Bowen concentrates on revealing the fissures in society. Rather than seeking to uphold the status quo, she writes out of a profound sense of her own alienation, an estrangement which can be traced to the losses of her early childhood. Nicholas Royle goes so far as to insist that Bowen's novels are not social at all but “concern the asocial and psychotic.” Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, he argues that one can find traces of “refused or impossible mourning, unspeakable secrets, and transgenerational hauntings” in all her novels, even in the apparently lighthearted A World of Love.³ As she grew older, Bowen's sense of isolation increased. In consequence, the experimental features of her final novels seem to threaten the existence of social comedy altogether.

The first step toward understanding Bowen's contributions to narrative form is to recognize that particularly her last two novels represent a transitional genre, what Roger Salomon calls “desperate storytelling.” Like the writers in the mock-heroic tradition whose work he examines, Bowen also felt that she was “living beyond or ‘post’ any cultural period” appropriate for the conventions of her chosen genre, traditional social comedy. Yet, for personal reasons, she “still remained committed in some fashion to the values generated by such narrative.”⁴ Events in her later life encouraged her to transform the conservative conventions of comedy almost beyond recognition.

In view of the complexity of Bowen's work and the effect of aging upon her writing, an interdisciplinary approach is needed to illuminate the final novels. By linking a psychodynamic understanding of depression with the theoretical perspectives of biography and literary gerontology, one can interpret Bowen's experimental novels in a much more favorable light than do critics like Hermione Lee, without losing sight of the author's intricate texture. Although aging, ill health, and depression played an important role in shaping Bowen's later fiction, Lee misses the point when she claims these novels merely illustrate the novelist's “late malaise” and should be dismissed as “symptoms of a predicament,” the result of the “rather unhappy circumstances of Elizabeth Bowen's old age.”⁵

Instead, Amir Cohen-Shalev recently has suggested that the last works of aging artists (and by implication writers) often arouse inflated expectations in the viewer/critic. When these final works, he suggests, are “too elusive for unequivocal delivery in an established code,” they are often rejected as a symptom of decline. Moreover, Spencer Curtis Brown, Bowen's close friend and literary executor, testifies that in her last years the writer “deliberately sought new techniques and all the excitement of learning to express her own individual music on a new instrument.” She attempted to remove as much of the omniscient narrator as possible, allowing the characters to talk and act without her interpretation. He asserts that the challenge kept her writing vigorous and experimental. Although she wrote about a fallen world, one radically changed from her girlhood, he notes that “her sense of comedy … irradiated the later books even more than the earlier.” Psychiatrist George Vaillant puts the issue well when he says that “anxiety and depression, like blisters and fractures, become the price of a venturesome life.”⁶

Seen from this perspective, Eva Trout and The Little Girls represent a new direction in Bowen's fiction. They can rightly be seen as the development of a late style rather than as a symptom of malaise. In fact, we can read these final novels as part of Bowen's search for identity, a pursuit one scarcely would expect from a novelist writing in her early sixties. Nonetheless, this is a quest which the critic can share by attempting—as Norman Holland put it—to “develop continuities through both … life and … writing.” Such a reading suggests that Bowen's swan songs have much to teach us about courage near the end of life.⁷

In order to understand Bowen's accomplishments, one must reassess the very real problems that she faced at several critical points in her personal and professional life. From the beginning to the end, Bowen's experiences blended an unusual mixture of aristocratic privilege and emotional deprivation. When she was young, both her family and her country were besieged by events beyond their control. She descended from an Anglo-Irish family, which had built Bowen's Court in 1775 (BC [Bowen's Court], 161). Neither social prestige, however, nor family inheritance could save her from feeling unprotected as a child. During her youth Ireland itself was torn asunder in the conflict between the indigenous Roman Catholic inhabitants and their Protestant landholders. Bowen's Court survived the Troubles intact. Yet guerrilla tactics shook the confidence of the landed aristocracy, and the Bowens had many an uneasy moment (BC, 439-40).

Moreover, Bowen's personal family life was unmanageably precarious. Henry Bowen, her father, went mad when she was five (BC, 409) and eventually was institutionalized for some years. Her mother was so determinedly oblivious to his state that relatives had to warn her of her husband's increasingly demented condition. Things deteriorated to such an extreme that Bowen found it necessary at the age of six to pursue a “campaign of not noticing” troublesome events around her (BC, 416). Eventually, after two years of reacting to Henry Bowen's illness, Mrs. Bowen decided to move with her daughter to the coast of Kent, where they lived near the mother's “network” of relatives (EB, 24). Despite frequent moves from one “fantasy home” to another—much like the ones Eva Trout attempts to build for her adopted son Jeremy—Bowen and her mother were able to create what the novelist called “pavilions of love” (P&C [Pictures and Conversations], 29).

According to Bowen it was at Kent—the scene where the novel The Little Girls takes place—that she began to discover her sensitivity to and love of landscape (P&C, 7-9), an affection which eventually provided some compensation for the discomfort of the disruptions of her life. Furthermore, in time her father's mental health started to improve, allowing him to visit them. Then in 1912 when Bowen was thirteen, her mother developed cancer and died (BC, 424-25). The girl had no chance to bid her mother farewell. She had been farmed out to a neighbor, a decision that made the child feel superfluous. No doubt the elders thought they were protecting her from the ravages of grief, but the isolation meant that she could not mourn naturally. She cried the first night, but on the day of the funeral, which she was not allowed to attend, she “gave way to an excess of high spirits,” reported the friend with whom she was staying (EB, 27). Afterwards, for many years Bowen “could not remember her [mother], think of her, speak of her or suffer to hear her spoken of” (P&C, 48).

Bowen, Victoria Glendinning asserts, transcended rather than repressed those things that puzzled her.⁸ According to the biographer, by closing her eyes to the problems around her, she managed to survive her father's hospitalization, subsequent moves, and her mother's death without developing debilitating emotional scars. Indeed, Bowen herself believed that her early life taught her to love places and things more than people. The dreamlike atmosphere of her early life, she thought, explained why she had fewer early memories than most people, a characteristic she shares with her heroine Eva Trout as well. Glendinning claimed that Bowen's methods of managing her feelings were largely successful, agreeing with the novelist that a lifelong stammer remained her only significant disability (EB, 22-23; P&C, 12).

In contrast, I would argue that Bowen found the reality of her mother's death, in conjunction with her father's mental illness and the uprooting from her ancestral home, too much to face. Much later the writer discussed how at the age of eight she had refused to let herself think of her lost home, Bowen's Court, saying, “Perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all” (BC, 418-19). George Pollock in “Mourning and Adaptation,” has argued that the loss of a parent inhibits a child's capacity to mature emotionally. In his judgment “a sudden unexpected death” is far more traumatic than “a chronic loss due to institutionalization.” Bowen experienced both kinds of losses at particularly vulnerable times in her childhood. As Pollock has demonstrated, the degree of suffering depends partly upon the age and the psychosexual stage of the survivor. Henry Bowen's illness began when his daughter was five and lasted until she was eleven (BC, 409). Thus, she had little opportunity to work through her oedipal feelings for him. Then Mrs. Bowen died when her daughter was thirteen and about to enter puberty, a time when girls tend to be especially dependent upon their mothers (BC, 425). No wonder Bowen, like one of George Pollock's patients, attempted to “defend herself against … feelings of ‘nothingness and emptiness.’”⁹ When one considers that Bowen's grief was blocked, it is not surprising that her entire oeuvre is full of references to orphans and bereavement—indicating how affected she was by that loss. Yet not until she began writing The Little Girls in her early sixties could she make use of the details of those final days in Kent.

It seems likely that the trauma of loss forced Bowen to employ what Abraham and Torok call “preservative repression,” in which the past is preserved in such a repressed form that no part of it can be undone or expiated for. Becoming an orphan made Bowen preternaturally aware of what Nicholas Rand calls “the gaps or ‘silences’ left within the living by the secrets of others.” Writing fiction, however, provided Bowen the opportunity to relive old hurts and name the unnameable. She never became an hysteric or a cryptophore—a person who is obsessed by dark secrets—but, as Royle has noted, her fiction contains many metaphors of secrets, crimes, accomplices, and tombs, all of which clearly had personal significance to her.¹⁰ As she grew older, Bowen gained considerable insight into madness. Indeed her later novels are dedicated to the principle that the line between sanity and madness is permeable; aberrant behavior has recognizable origins. Especially in later life, Bowen wrote fluently about individuals who threaten to cross the barrier between sane and insane, without losing sympathy for their situation.

Although Bowen's resilience and understanding of the etiology of madness are impressive, her behavior resembled her mother's habit of denial. For many years the novelist, like her mother, avoided facing uncomfortable truths, although she never carried the habit to the same pathological extent. Instead, her imagination compensated her for occasional parental neglect. Bowen recalled that her parents “ruled their private kingdoms of thought, and inside it, I, their first child, began to set up my own” (SW [Seven Winters], 9). By such means, Glendinning observes, Bowen effectively avoided psychic unhappiness, while leading a reasonably normal life and beginning a remarkable career as a novelist and short-story writer (EB, 22-23).

Bowen's method of repressing emotional dilemmas appeared to work effectively for some years. Art offered an arena for displacing personal conflict, a domain to explore her own feelings at a considerable remove without violating the kind of detachment she prized. In youth, some aspects of the disturbances that she had knowingly suppressed became the raw material of her fictional world. Bowen's orphaned state made her especially sensitive to the plight of vulnerable or unwanted progeny. Her early novels feature young people who are powerless to protect themselves against the vagaries and diffidence of their caretakers. In them Bowen re-created the conspiratorial atmosphere of her childhood. At times her characters react to the dishonesty of their elders. Her juveniles are rarely passive; thus, many of them become disruptive forces in their households. By the time she wrote her final novel, however, she realized that violence might be unleashed if successive generations disregarded the welfare of their offspring. In Eva Trout Eva's young son, the deaf and dumb Jeremy, appears to be indifferent to what his adopted mother Eva might be doing. In the end, though, he explodes destructively, shooting his mother with a revolver.

In novel after novel Bowen returned obsessively to the same themes, a repetition which suggests that art by itself is not an effective therapy. Instead, like most individuals for whom writing provides an outlet for powerful feelings, devising scenes of orphans and neglected children temporarily relieved Bowen's anguish but did not permanently resolve her deep sense of deprivation and loss. Her bereavement also had a powerful influence on the choices she made early in life, and those choices in turn continued to affect her selection of subject matter in fiction. Although the benign interest of her extended family spared her the worst effects of social isolation, nonetheless Bowen craved a more personal, familial, and romantic love. In 1921 at twenty, shortly after her father's remarriage in 1918 (EB, 38), she announced an engagement, but the whole matter ended so abruptly that in time it almost seemed to have been a dream. Glendinning describes Bowen's condition during that period as “heightened” and reports that from the start her aunt was “sceptical.” Glendinning dismisses the subject with the purely social observation that ultimately “nothing worked out. … It wouldn't have done” (EB, 40).

Yet the writer was haunted by recollections of that event, with its uncomfortable but absurd mixture of desire and social control. More than forty years later, on the first page of Eva Trout, the heroine refers to a newly broken engagement (ET [Eva Trout] 11). Of course Eva does not represent the novelist directly, nor can we infer Bowen's feelings from Eva's reactions. The heroine has no “sceptical” relatives to challenge her fantasy although privately her friends disparage her story. Also, unlike the novelist who years later could still recapture the confusion that surrounded her own failed engagement, Eva abandons her painful recollection more easily. Sometime later in the novel when the memory has faded, Eva readily admits that the whole matter was a hoax (ET, 89). But when one considers the sexual charades with which the novel abounds—a supposed pregnancy that is really an illegal adoption and the fake wedding journey that Eva tries to stage at the end with her beloved Henry—that broken engagement and its attendant commotion had clearly left its imprint on Bowen's imagination.

At twenty-four the aspiring young writer, who had just published her first volume of stories, married Alan Cameron, despite the warning signs that he might lack sexual interest in her. At thirty Cameron was living a comfortable bachelor's existence with his mother and a clergyman, who, years later, became the prototype of Father Tony Clavering-Haight in Eva Trout. Glendinning interprets Bowen's marriage to the older Cameron as happy but admittedly celibate. At the same time, the biographer suggests that Bowen became a compulsive writer partly to compensate for her lack of sexual satisfaction.¹¹ In 1933, three years after her father's death (EB, 69), Bowen began to satisfy her emotional needs by taking a series of much younger men as lovers, the first of whom was an Oxford don, Humphrey House (EB, 86). He later told his wife that Bowen had been a virgin when their affair began (EB, 88). Far more important and long-lasting in Bowen's life than House, however, was Charles Ritchie, a Canadian. Yet in the end he was as elusive as her father Henry Bowen had been. Although Ritchie was unfailingly devoted, Bowen never had the satisfaction of marrying him, even when she was free to do so. In 1948, just four years before Cameron's death, Ritchie married his cousin, thereby effectively removing himself from the list of eligible bachelors (EB, 182).

Bowen's frustrated longing for the much younger Ritchie helps explain why her heroine, Eva Trout, suffers from unrequited love for Henry Dancey, who at the novel's beginning is only twelve years old. Several reasons point to Henry Dancey being a parodic version of Charles Ritchie. Ritchie, who was seven years younger than Bowen, was the great love of her life, just as Henry is, even though he is twelve years younger than Eva. Further, Henry assists Eva in her ill-fated attempt to sell her Jaguar and leave the Arbles without a trace. Bowen, who herself felt like an “outsider-insider” in England, thanks to her Anglo-Irish heritage, sensed that Canadian Ritchie shared her anomalous position in England, as well as her occasional moments of feeling like a spy (EB, 139). Both Henry and Ritchie also played the role of younger brother to an admired older sister. In view of Henry's and Eva's oedipal, indeed almost incestuous, devotion, Bowen chose to name young Dancey for her father Henry Bowen rather than for Ritchie, to whom she dedicated the novel.

At this point one must remember that Bowen was capable of salvaging situations that another less talented person might have found devastating. For example, odd though her sexless marriage seems in our hypersexual age, Alan Cameron apparently met her most important emotional needs, by providing a replacement for her parents.¹² He managed their business affairs, selected her wardrobe, and provided a necessary stability to their lives. He conducted his affairs—whatever they were—so discreetly that Glendinning makes no mention of any liaison, making only a few references to a longtime married friend and colleague Eric Gillett. Most observers agree that Bowen loved Cameron, and ample evidence suggests that she was emotionally dependent upon him, but after he died signs of tension in their relationship appear in Eva Trout. In that novel Bowen wittily portrays the interaction of several homosexual and celibate men, Constantine Ormeau, Willy Trout, and Father Clavering-Haight. To some extent, the novelist sits in judgment. Eva has clearly been the victim of her father's neglect; all his attention went to his fickle lover, Constantine.

Still no matter how inadequate Cameron may have been as a lover, when he died, from alcoholism and heart and eye trouble, Bowen at fifty-three felt that her world had vanished. Her elaborate defenses collapsed. For some time she found it difficult to write at all. Circumstances made a mockery of her attempt to imitate her mother by “not noticing.” In the ensuing depression she found it impossible to manage her financial affairs and ended by selling Bowen's Court in 1959 to a man who promptly tore it down (BC, 459). Not only did Bowen feel the loss of her reliable guide and support, but Cameron's death rekindled the feelings of grief that she had repressed at her mother's untimely death. Studies of mourning indicate how complex that phenomenon can be. Early evidence suggested that in some cases a second bereavement in adulthood can trigger what John Bowlby calls “a belated reaction” to an earlier loss that was never mourned. In 1968 Felix Brown, an English psychiatrist, noted that as early as 1926 Mapother had pointed out that when individuals who are orphaned early in life lose a spouse later on, the depression they experience shows “a regression to events in early life tinged with the same emotion, suggesting that it is a kind of reactivation of some previous experience.” Brown also reports Anthony's 1940 findings that the death of a parent often arouses feelings of guilt in children between the ages of eight and twelve—Bowen was just thirteen. Bowlby's 1980 study of depression further confirms such findings, while George Pollock reported in 1981 that “empirical findings from individuals who lost parents or siblings in childhood” indicate that they are predisposed to “a severe reaction to a later life change or loss.”¹³

The upheavals of Bowen's fifties and sixties suggest that her husband's death set off a belated crisis of mourning for her long-dead mother. Fortunately, she had the means to overcome her difficulties. At first, however, the amount of work she produced diminished, as she restlessly moved about the United States taking up one writer-in-residence post after another (EB, 206). Her literary agent, Curtis Brown, reports that she had “a bad breakdown of health” after she sold Bowen's Court, exacerbated by “guilt that she had failed her ancestry by failing to pass on her inheritance.” Fortunately her novelistic gifts, he says, distracted her from her troubles and allowed her “to keep her life creatively and satisfyingly full.”¹⁴ Bowen managed to write only three novels in the twenty years after Cameron's death, whereas in the previous twenty she had written seven. Still, her last two novels eventually provided a battleground where she could struggle with her unruly emotions. They contain some of her most probing and powerful material; at long last she confronted more openly than before her suppressed feelings about her mother and her often mixed emotions about her husband.

The Little Girls, published when Bowen was sixty-four, provided the initial turning point in her later career. Its protagonist, Dinah Delacroix, battles her unacknowledged sense of loss by means of an unconventional life review, in which Bowen participated by proxy. In his landmark 1963 essay, “The Life Review,” Robert Butler describes four main aspects of that moment when an individual finds it necessary to survey his or her past. Looking backwards at some point in a conscious fashion and reviewing one's life, he notes, are universal traits. The elderly, whose futures are short, tend to reminisce more than the young. In some cases this scrutiny can contribute to the occurrence of “late-life disorders” such as depression, which it does in Dinah's case. Finally, those elderly whose life review has a positive outcome may develop “candor, serenity, and wisdom.” He also believes that individuals initiate a life review “as a general response to crisis of various types,” of which death is the most obvious example. Although Dinah is not in a state of crisis before she initiates the life review, Bowen certainly was.¹⁵

Thematically, as the Bowen critics have pointed out, the novel deals with the insatiable desire of those growing older to recapture the past. The main character Dinah is an exceptionally attractive woman in her late fifties; in fact, her youthful appearance suggests that life has not quite touched her. Yet she has been married and widowed and is now the mother of two sons, as well as a grandmother. She is prone to enthusiasms which make little sense to her friends. Most recently, she has been burying objects in a cave, so that future generations will be able to reconstruct her society from those remnants. Suddenly, she is sent into a fugue state by the juxtaposition of a chance question, “Who's going to seal it up?” and the sight of an uneven swing (LG [The Little Girls], 16, 20).¹⁶ Then, realizing that she is repeating an experience from her girlhood, she becomes obsessed with desire to find her long-lost schoolmates, whom she last saw in 1914. At age eleven they had all scattered when World War I broke out. Impulsively Dinah sends out nearly £100 worth of newspaper advertisements until the two women respond. The old friends feel that their settled lives are in jeopardy when they are summoned by this voice from the past. Clare, the woman for whom Dinah has the most elaborate feelings, is particularly uncomfortable with Dinah's intensity.

Bowen's new way of writing “externally” without interpreting her characters' thoughts and feelings makes this beginning read like a play with inadequate stage directions. Why should a crooked swing and an unsealed cave start Dinah upon her quest? Yet for Bowen the answer is simple; like the clinician Jean Baker Miller, she perceives the importance of relationships in women's lives, especially those developed in latency. As a result, Dinah comes to life as a character for the first time in the marvelously vital scenes of reunion with her friends. These encounters also demonstrate the truth of Carol Gilligan's observation that women feel bonded to the lives of their friends. Even though the three women have been separated for many years, they quickly recapture their old selves and interact with all their accustomed eccentricities, in what is almost a private code.¹⁷ The very ease with which they resume their more assertive and engaged girlhood behavior suggests that they had lost or left behind an important segment of themselves when they parted from their friends many years before. Thus, Bowen implies that adult behavior is a mask which can disintegrate when one is reunited with old friends.

The middle section consists of a flashback to 1914. It takes place largely at St. Agatha's, during the summer when Dinah and her friends were eleven, at the end of latency. The reconstruction not only captures the essence of this time in their lives but provides the information necessary to understand what is happening in the present. The little girls play like puppy dogs, sexual differences being irrelevant. The little boys who hang on the periphery of their world are treated like brothers or cousins. Parents are people whose commands must be slyly circumvented. Outward rebellion is not possible, but the girls are experts at obeying the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Their irreverent behavior reminds us that Bowen as a girl was accused of being “bumptious” (BC, 420) and participated enthusiastically in her cousin's rows (P&C, 17). The world Bowen describes is an Edenic one, captured just before the snake of self-consciousness enters the garden.

The three girls, Dinah, Clare, and Sheila—a.k.a. Dicey, Mumbo, and Sheikie—are best friends and partners in crime. Dinah and Clare, however, have a special bond that exceeds their emotional understanding.¹⁸ Dinah's mother and Clare's father are in love but are entirely too honorable to disrupt their families by having an affair. Mrs. Piggott, Dinah's mother, is a widow; her husband committed suicide before Dinah was born (LG, 193). The two eleven-year-olds are caught up in the world of adult emotions that they can only dimly fathom. In spite of the undercurrent of adult emotions, the girls are entirely childlike and convincing in their reactions.

Bowen is a master at evoking the comic atmosphere of the school life of girls. In a BBC interview of 1959, three years before she began The Little Girls, she described writing in language that echoes D. W. Winnicott's location of creativity in an intermediate space “between the dream and the reality, that which is called the cultural life.” Bowen declared that composing is “an extension … of the imaginative play thing a child has—that life isn't amusing enough, so you build it up with imagination of your own” (EB, 31). Thus, one incident from girlhood appeared in her novel. Shortly after her mother's death, Bowen instigated a “burying ritual” at her school, Harpenden Hall (P&C, 57). Glendinning, reflecting Bowen's view of the matter, emphasizes that the girls merely buried “a biscuit tin containing some cryptic writing” (EB, 29). She misses the point that Bowen was seeking a means to handle her anxieties about her mother's death and burial. Sensitive children who are not allowed to see the dead body sometimes worry that the corpse is not truly dead and will wake up later on in the grave. As a result, much attention in The Little Girls is given to whether the coffer the girls bury still contains the objects they had placed in it. Furthermore, much of this section is devoted to the details of purchasing accoutrements for the burial and making plans—exactly the stages from which Bowen had been excluded when her mother died. The attention devoted to the details of the burial suggests that the episode in some strange way compensated for that exclusion, by allowing the adult writer the opportunity to explore her early anxieties about death.¹⁹ Knowing something of Bowen's personal history explains why Dinah regresses when years later she discovers that the items have been removed from the coffer.

The middle section ends on July 23, 1914, with a picnic, the sort of ritual set piece found in Jane Austen and other writers of social comedy. But this picnic, like the one in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), marks the disruption of normal social intercourse, the unleashing of evil. It begins innocently enough as a celebration of one child's birthday and the end of summer term. It would have been a time of temporary leave-taking had not the war broken out early the next month. As it happened the goodbyes were to be unexpectedly permanent, just as Mrs. Bowen's death had been for her daughter. Frustration marks the farewells. Major Burkin-Jones is forced to speak to his lady love, Mrs. Piggott, in a sort of code, lest the attentive Dinah realize their intense attachment. Feeling excluded, Dinah runs to bid Clare farewell, but Clare refuses to greet her properly. She drives off triumphantly with her father, leaving Dinah screaming her name at the top of her lungs like an angry infant deprived of her mother.

As a result of the rupture, emotional moments continue to reverberate, much as the mysterious sound in the Marabar Caves echoes for Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore in Forster's A Passage to India. In contrast, however, Forster's characters cannot escape the resounding echo. They are forced to reevaluate their lives. But Bowen's characters, like their creator, adeptly bury their misery. Therefore, when Dinah sees Clare in adulthood, she has no idea why she is troubled by Clare's presence. The two women brief each other on their parents' deaths quite calmly, but very gradually a dim memory of that long-ago parting works its way to the surface of Dinah's mind, making her feel as if she had been recently bereaved.

The final section of the novel returns to the present. Dinah feels compelled to complete the unfinished business of the past. She instigates the digging up of the coffer, which turns out to be empty, indicating the impossibility of reconstructing the past as it once was. Feeling devastated by her discovery, she turns to Clare for comfort. Clare, however, is loath to respond; Dinah reminds her too much of Mrs. Piggott, whom Clare had loved years ago with a child's helpless intensity. In one key scene Dinah asks her if she is a lesbian (LG, 197). Clare refuses to answer, but clearly she is afraid of the feelings that Dinah arouses. As a result, Clare deserts Dinah one Sunday night, leaving her friend in a distracted state.

Dinah's accident and reaction are very like Miss Quested's hysterical adventure in the Marabar Caves in Forster's novel. She has a mysterious collapse, which Glendinning suggests has earmarks of the madness of Bowen's father (EB, 220). At this point Dinah's children and grandchildren close ranks. Dinah's sons display their resilience, as well as their comic obtuseness. They tell Sheila Artworth that their forceful mother is “as a rule … so very placid” (LG, 232). (Sheila feels compelled to divert herself from reacting by playing with her finger bowl.) Still Bowen is not as despairing about the survival of the family as is Forster. Dinah is a widow like her mother, but the two boys have had each other—and various cousins—for moral support. Clare and Dinah may suffer from “the non-sins of our fathers—and mothers” as Dinah suggests (LG, 186), yet Dinah's children are exempt from the curse. The family as a whole can survive the disintegration of one individual. Therefore Dinah's granddaughters sit complacently in the living room cutting pictures out of magazines, safe in their childish world while the adults agonize around them. Rumors of trouble have reached them but do not penetrate their defenses.

Moreover, friendship triumphs at last. Gradually the story is reconstructed, by combining all possible tellers with all available listeners. The psychoanalyst Winnicott understood the therapeutic value of such reconstructions and emphasized how important the empathic listener can be to the process of healing.²⁰ Even the peripheral Sheila Artworth finds some comfort from the renewed friendship. She tells the story of her lost love to Clare (LG, 229-30) and, without stirring up any animosity or disgust, admits to Dinah's sons that she had deposited in the coffer her sixth toe, a congenital anomaly which had shamed her in girlhood. She had never told her friends about that toe. Her obsessive dancing, Bowen hints, with its exhibitionist elements compensated her for feeling deformed (LG, 234-35). In contrast, Clare and Dinah take longer to sort out their misunderstandings. Eventually Clare realizes that Dinah merely wants to be consoled for the losses of her childhood, rather than to take Mrs. Piggott's place as an unconscious temptress. Then, at last, she comforts the needy Dinah. In the very last scene, Clare finally remembers the picnic in 1914 when she failed to bid her distraught friend farewell. In recompense she says goodbye to Dinah “for now and for then.” Dinah wakes as if from a bad dream, saying, “Clare, Clare, where have you been?” (LG, 236-37), and the novel ends on the redemptive recognition of loss and the hope for some restitution in the future.

The message of the novel is mixed. Reconstructing the past is a disturbing experience, which may at least temporarily put the protagonist at risk. Hildebidle argues that such journeys into the past represent “death threats to the self.” Indeed, Bowen emphasizes that the journey of remembrance is full of risk; depression is the inevitable outcome if one expects to be able to bring back the past completely. Yet Dinah's story demonstrates that some recollection is absolutely necessary when events in the present have reawakened unacknowledged grief from the past. Bowen's narrative also makes the case for the importance of latency and the friendships of that period in the life of a woman. In fact, she hints that unless one reenters the past and recaptures at least a trace of one's old self, one may be doomed to sleepwalk through life. Therefore the novel ends on an affirmative note. Dinah and Clare are able to repair some of the damage that the uprooting had caused. Bowen herself experienced a cathartic effect from completing the novel, similar to the relief of insight that George Pollock's patients feel after regaining their memory of past events.²¹ After The Little Girls was published, Bowen bought a house in the town where her mother had died. As her biographer has commented, that action completed “her return journey” (EB, 221).

Although fiction offered Bowen an opportunity to view her sense of displacement at some remove, the actual drafting of the novel took its toll. She had difficulty concluding The Little Girls and needed more than the usual amount of help and moral support from her agent, Curtis Brown.²² The novel's conceptual problems resulted from its emotionally charged content. Not only was her heroine, Dinah Delacroix, attempting to reconstruct the severed strands of her past life experience and to understand her own emotions, but the author was engaged in the same task as well. As a result she could not be confident about the direction that the work should take. In its complicated plot, Bowen reconstructs the fragments of her early life with her mother, in those last days before Mrs. Bowen's untimely death. (Although Bowen had described those last years in Bowen's Court [1942], at that time she made no attempt to recapture her feelings for her beloved mother.) The abrupt ending to that happy interlude had made Bowen feel for many years that relationships with houses and with people were too fragile to be recaptured once they were ruptured, a point she later repeats in Eva Trout (ET, 163, 254). Finishing The Little Girls, however, temporarily released Bowen from that limiting belief in her personal life.

The lessons of insight, however, do not last forever. Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes (1969), written in her late sixties, a few years before she died of lung cancer, continues Bowen's effort to probe her past and explore her vision of the future. Although critics like Hermione Lee have condemned it, this novel is intuitive, detached, and honest in its pessimism. Because Bowen better understood and accepted her own mixed feelings, she accurately captured the irrational strength of all of her characters' desires. Having successfully confronted the profound sense of loss caused by her mother's death in The Little Girls, Bowen could examine her own deeply submerged love for and disappointment in the men and the places in her life, past and present. Her recent loss aroused an old sense of being orphaned; thus she exhibited, as George Vaillant claims the “unloved” often do, “a special capacity to identify and to empathize with the pain and suffering in the world.”²³ At the same time she exhibited considerable control by constructing a narrative of Olympian detachment in which to consider these painful feelings. The novel's disjointed structure—once again Bowen moves through time and space without providing any guides—challenges the reader to follow the abrupt shifts in time and place. The plot consists of a series of “changing scenes,” a pattern that Bowen reinforces by means of the novel's subtitle. Although several scenes of vicarage life—based on the author's girlhood recollections of having lessons with a nearby rector's family (P&C, 16-17)—appear in the early chapters, other elements undermine this familiar convention of social comedy. As the author herself hints in the text, the novel is a black comedy (ET, 239).

This time the aging writer creates what Glendinning calls an “eponymous heroine … an orphaned heiress, unloved, clumsy, ‘left unfinished’, innocent with that damaging innocence so deep-lodged in Elizabeth's mythology” (EB, 225). Eva's remarkable mix of complete vulnerability and mythic forcefulness represents some elements of the writer herself. Losing Bowen's Court had destroyed some of the writer's confidence, thereby creating a dilemma which she converts into a metaphor for Eva's predicament. One senses that Eva's unsettled childhood, during which she moved constantly following her father and his lover, Constantine, provides an objective correlative for Bowen's feelings of dislocation, which had been exacerbated by the author's violent reaction to losing her ancestral home. In the novel the ruined castle, which Eva and the Danceys visit first in chapter 1, represents Bowen's late, lamented family estate. The castle is no longer habitable. Seeing it awakens Eva's desperate need for love, but even she realizes that it is not a place to realize these dreams. This novel, however, is by no means completely autobiographical, despite the echoes from Bowen's life and the presence of some familiar people. Eva is an artistic creation.²⁴ She is what Bowen thought she might have become had she been less fortunate or had less talent, and, of course, Eva's situation is far more dire than Bowen's ever was. In contrast to the author, Eva never learns to mourn her lost mother nor understands how damaged she has been by such a childhood.

The plot unfolds inexorably following the logic of a Greek tragedy. It abounds with many hints of impending doom, and its protagonist is as blind to their meaning as Oedipus is to Tiresias's warnings. This time, however, Bowen constructs her fatalism on psychological insight rather than on repression. She carefully describes the way in which well-meaning and successful families for generation after generation inadvertently damage their children until one of their offspring finally wreaks a terrible revenge. The plot's gyrations also parody the uprooted nature of contemporary life, by exaggerating the many moves Bowen herself had experienced. Eva, the heiress, is unleashed upon an unsuspecting world with too much money and too little sense of what it means to be a member of a family. Her answer to any frustration is to go into hiding somewhere else, thus frightening and hurting the feelings of those who feel responsible for her.²⁵ The novel's disrupted chronology represents the difficulties of reconstructing the character of Eva's past.

Unlike Dinah Delacroix and her friends, Eva has no confidant, no one who has shared her life. Instead her story is pieced together by bit players, who have little empathy for her plight. Her shallow parents provide no example of mature love. Thus Eva can experience desire but does not develop any sense of responsibility for her beloved. Her mother dies in an airplane crash, while absconding with a young lover. Her father, a financier of world renown named Willy Trout, reserves his deepest affections for his lover, the perfidious Constantine, while he finds servants and schools willing to watch over the orphaned Eva. Willy never notices that his daughter can neither talk clearly nor cry. As a result Eva seems hardly human. Unlike Bowen, whose maternal aunts took charge of her, none of Eva's relatives fills the gap. At the novel's end, Eva is depressed and angered when family members who answer her invitation to see her off at Victoria Station fail even to recognize her. She complains to Constantine, “Those were my people; they should have known me” (ET, 264).

Eva's life consists of a series of melodramatic events, similar to those found in many soap operas, but which are transformed by Bowen's ability to combine a comic sensibility with real feelings drawn from her own past. The narrative shifts ground periodically, forcing the reader to struggle to assimilate a kaleidoscope of conflicting perspectives. For example, the disruptions of early childhood are followed by a marvelously comic episode at an experimental school. Housed in the famous castle, the school is financed by Willy Trout and stocked with renegade teachers and delinquent children, who are psychologically well-informed and old beyond their years. They set “an Oedipus-trap” for one of the teachers “by arranging an effigy of his mother in his bed” (ET, 51). The children's behavior is so outrageous that Mrs. Stote, a local cleaner, calls the institution “a Home for afflicted children” and ponders why Eva “had to be put away” when her only sin was being “a little dull” (ET, 53). The school closed its doors at the end of term when Eva's roommate, named Elsinore after Hamlet's castle, nearly dies from complications following a suicide attempt. Yet despite the absurd name, Elsinore awakens Eva's desire for love. Watching Elsinore be rescued by her mother encourages Eva to seek a substitute for her own dead one.

Thus, Eva insists on being transferred to a conventional boarding school, a more likely hunting ground. There she encounters a gifted teacher, Iseult Smith, who undertakes to humanize the girl. She, however, abruptly abandons Eva when the mother-hungry girl recites a Metaphysical poem, one which reveals her intense love for her teacher (ET, 65-66). Eva loves Iseult much as the child Clare loves Mrs. Piggott in The Little Girls. Like the grown-up Clare, Miss Smith rejects her pupil's overtures to avoid the temptation of succumbing to Eva's appeal. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge, some years later, after her father's suicide, Eva decides to move into her teacher's house—Miss Smith having in the meantime married Eric Arble. This time the monstrous young woman proceeds to destroy their marriage by enticing the susceptible Eric.

Meantime, the Danceys, the vicar's family in the Arbles' village, try to provide Eva with a taste of normal family life. This episode is based on one of Bowen's girlhood recollections. During the years when Bowen was living in exile with her mother, someone arranged for her to take lessons with the Salmons, the family of a nearby clergyman. Unfortunately, their intimate family life intensified the child's feelings of being an outsider (P&C, 14-19), and like Eva she asserted her supremacy whenever possible. Not surprisingly, the Danceys' intervention is equally doomed to failure. Instead of attaching herself to the parents, Eva singles out Henry, aged twelve, to be her savior. Henry attracts her for several reasons. He is the most intelligent and best-looking of his family, and instead of being afraid of Eva, he treats her “as he might an astray moose which when too overpowering could be shooed away” (ET, 14). Of course, he needs to grow up quickly if he is to play the required role of consort. Needless to say, he is entranced by the twenty-four-year-old young woman. She beguiles him with tales of a broken engagement, a view of the deserted castle where the honeymoon was to have taken place, and with what Iseult Arble calls “those consuming eyes and that shoving Jaguar” (ET, 92).

At this point, Eva increases the tension by running away and later hinting to Iseult that she was going to bear Eric Arble's child. She then departs to America where she buys a child, Jeremy, in an illegal adoption. For all her great wealth, however, she receives what Henry Dancey later calls “a pup” (ET, 152), damaged goods, for the child can neither hear nor talk.²⁶ Henry mistakenly assumes that no one could love a child like that, but Eva, who for most of her life has felt far more defective, adores the boy. For a number of years Eva voluntarily stays in exile in America, re-creating Bowen's “pavilions of love” with her mother by excluding the outside world from her symbiotic relationship with Jeremy. When, however, the time comes for the boy to be educated, the basis of their connection disintegrates. Eva, whose desire for romantic love knows no bounds, returns to England where she once again visits Henry Dancey. She ends by turning her son over to the Bonnards, French doctors and educators, while she pursues Henry, who at twenty is almost old enough to marry.

Despite the twists and turns of the plot, Bowen's presentation of male characters and of grieving families represents new emotional dimensions in her work. Men play a minor role in The Little Girls but display a greater range of feeling in Eva Trout. For example, Constantine begins as a sly villain. He manipulates Eva and the Arbles, as he had once juggled lovers while keeping a firm grasp on the affections of Willy Trout. By the end of the novel, however, he seems dazzled by Eva, almost obsequious in his expressed desire to give her whatever aid she needs. Mr. Dancey, Henry's father, becomes increasingly important as the plot progresses. He was based partly on Bowen's recollection of Mr. Salmon, the clergyman father whom she had “continued to idolise” in girlhood, even when the lessons she was having with his daughters went badly (P&C, 18). Although Mr. Dancey's perpetual hay fever provides a leitmotiv for him, much as it does for Forster's Wilcoxes in Howards End (1910), Dancey, unlike the Wilcoxes, is capable of a full range of human emotion. He wrestles with complex feelings of love and concern for his unruly son, while he ministers impressively to his congregation. Moreover, he and his wife stoically bear witness to their grief after the death of their younger daughter, Louise. Unlike Eva's relatives, who do not even recognize her when they appear at the station, moments before her death, the Danceys provide an impressive example of deep feelings and love for a daughter. Surely Bowen could not have written such poignant and direct scenes in the years before she completed The Little Girls.

Surprisingly, Henry, cast in the heroic role far before his time, nearly lives up to Eva's emotional investment in him. Somehow he makes convincing rather than absurd the thirty-two-year-old Eva's love for him. Despite the incestuous dimension of their love—both of them are seeking to replace lost family members—almost by accident he teaches Eva to express her loving feelings. Yet Henry, unlike his parents, has great difficulty in telling anyone about Louise's death, for his sister was especially dear to him. In a moment of heightened emotion, he calls Eva “my love, my sister” (ET, 264), indicating that he hopes that Eva will take Louise's place in his heart. For her part, Eva hopes that Henry will compensate for all the missing relationships in her life, a tall order that is doomed to failure. Both of them are clearly replacing or “refinding” lost objects of desire. (According to Freud, all later love objects are replacements for the lost breast of infancy; “the finding of an object is in fact the refinding of it.”)²⁷ Still, we cannot help but respond to the vision of Eva weeping. For the first time in her life she sheds what Henry calls “those extraordinary tears!” (ET, 267), when he promises to make her fake wedding journey a real one.

Eva's apotheosis turns out to be cruelly short, for she has ignored the Bonnards' dire warnings about Jeremy's feelings. In following her heart, she, like Willy Trout, has attempted to abandon her child, but the boy refuses to play the role of passive victim. True to his American origin and upbringing, Jeremy finds a gun, which has been hidden among Eva's household effects by Iseult Arble. He arrives at Victoria Station, the scene of the start of Eva's wedding journey. He looks so much like a “child star” that the other participants assume that they have accidentally wandered onto a set and try not to obstruct “the rigged-up cameras which … they took to be present and in action, or soon in action—for, how should there not be cameras?” (ET, 265). Jeremy, who fancies himself an avenger like Orestes, shoots his mother. All the participants are stunned by Eva's demise: “a woman bystander to whom nothing was anything” is the only person capable of action. When Jeremy cannot stop running, “she snatched him back before he could fall over the dead body” (ET, 268). The novel ends with these words as if to indicate the uselessness of any further comment.

The novel's shattering violence and its depiction of sexual confusion surely reflected the cultural climate of the 1960s, the time in which it was written. The period was one of radical social and political upheaval, in which normal family values were challenged on every front. It was a particularly difficult time to endure for a politically conservative older woman, who was also mourning the loss of her husband and her family house. Yet Bowen created grim comic drama out of instability and upheaval. Writing about the demise of the Trouts made it easier to accept that she had no child to continue her own family line. Instead of privately mourning the end of the house of Bowen, she created a fictional memorial in the fall of the house of Trout. Rather than clinging to outworn conventions, as the novelist Barbara Pym had done during the same period, Bowen redesigned her novel to fit the changing mood that she sensed.²⁸

In these final works the novelist used her fiction to begin the task of re-creating her identity in old age. She constructed a discourse that moves toward the postmodern; she converted her disequilibrium into plots that quite literally mirror her sense of emptiness and fear of loss of control. Indeed, Bowen's final novels are remarkable testaments to the way in which art can transform unhappiness and abandonment into experimental forms. Although Bowen snatches tragedy out of the jaws of comedy in Eva Trout, nonetheless, her final novels are marked by the qualities of candor, serenity, and wisdom that Robert Butler sees as characteristic of most elderly individuals who successfully complete a life review, the serenity in Eva Trout being that of tragic catharsis. Bowen's art teaches us that these attributes in late life are neither static virtues nor cause for smugness. Indeed they assimilate pain, and at a cost. One senses that she learned to accept the uncertainty of her existence and almost to welcome the fluxes of her emotional life. Like the psychoanalyst Winnicott, who made no effort to cut short the “preliminary chaos” of the early days of treatment, for they were “the first phase of the creative process,” Bowen discovered that her creativity thrived on chaos. Although Anna Freud does not include writing comic fiction as one of the ways the ego defends itself in her famous The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, Bowen's example demonstrates that the creative process offers some artists a way of making effective use of their depression, so that, as Kathleen Woodward has pointed out, their art creates a space between mourning and melancholia.²⁹

These last two novels are an artistic and personal triumph for Bowen, but at the same time they make disturbing reading. They offer no easy compensation for the psychological losses the characters experience. Nonetheless, they represent a breakthrough in understanding the psychological forces that shape our lives. Throughout her literary career Elizabeth Bowen enjoyed enormous success with both literary critics and the general public. In fact, she had almost achieved the status of a literary icon by the time she wrote her last two novels. What we must recognize is that she risked this standing by making a bold departure from the well-established pattern that had brought her recognition. Rather than deplore, as Hermione Lee does, the uncertainty that permeates these novels, we should marvel that an acclaimed novelist chose to write so honestly and vulnerably about the insecurity that she experienced at the end of her life. Feeling confident in her own artistry, Bowen refused to offer easy conclusions. Unlike Constantine who even at the novel's end claims he has “nothing to declare” (ET, 264), Bowen was completely engaged in her world. By accepting her own agony and making the most of her hard-earned lessons she bequeathed us two stunning novels as a legacy.

Notes

1. Howard Moss, “Elizabeth Bowen,” 224; John Hildebidle, Five Irish Writers, 124. According to the most recent listings in the Journal of Modern Literature, Annual Review nos. 9-16 (Dec. 1982-89), besides the items cited in this chapter, work on Bowen includes six articles, six chapters in books, three dissertations, and nine chapters of thematic dissertations. Very little of a theoretical nature has appeared. At the same time Bowen's reputation among writers still remains strong.

2. Full-length studies of Bowen include: Victoria Glendinning's biography, EB; Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen; Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen; Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen.

3. Hildebidle, Irish Writers, 92, 128; Nicholas Royle, “Crypts in London.” An expanded and revised version of Royle's essay also will appear in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Still Lives. R. B. Kershner, Jr., “Bowen's Oneiric House in Paris,” also reveals the dark side of Bowen's comedy.

4. Roger B. Salomon, Desperate Storytelling, 3. Kathleen Woodward, “Late Theory, Late Style,” this volume, calls similar products of depression “love stories.”

5. Lee, EB, 190-91, 206.

6. Amir Cohen-Shalev, “Old Age Style,” 28; Spencer Curtis Brown, Foreword to PC, xxxvii-xxxviii; George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life, 370.

7. Norman Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost, 40. Holland recommends that we learn to become “more comfortable in one's own skin” (41) but does not describe how aging writers like Bowen struggle to piece together the missing fragments of their identity late in life.

   Eva Trout is Bowen's last completed novel. “The Move-In” is the first chapter of her final fragment. It consists of the unexpected and unwanted arrival of three young people at a country house, which they mistakenly believe to be owned by the aunt of a young man they once met casually on a bus. It has a comically eerie quality but is too fragmentary to suggests what direction Bowen would have taken.

8. Glendinning's biography now seems overly protective of the writer, for she accepts without question Bowen's interpretation of events. At the time of writing, Glendinning had to contend with Bowen's admirers, who were still under the spell of the novelist's powerful presence. Robert Liddell expressed his disapproval of Glendinning's biography, claiming that it was far too soon after Bowen's death for personal revelations or critical reevaluation of her work (Liddell to Barbara Pym, May 27, Oct. 1, 1978, Pym MS 154, fols. 123, 129). Still, Glendinning's rejection of psychological analysis kept her from showing Bowen triumphing over depression through the innovations of her art.

9. George H. Pollock, “Mourning and Adaptation,” 349, 353-54.

10. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “The Topography of Reality,” 64-65; Nicholas Rand, “Psychoanalysis with Literature,” 60. Royle, “Crypts in London,” finds Abraham and Torok's theory of the crypt or phantom useful in analyzing Bowen's work but fears that applying such an analysis to her life would result in a “crypto-analysis.”

11. Although Bowen had several affairs with men, according to May Sarton at least two were with women (Sarton, A World of Light, 195-97; Glendinning, EB, 192-93). Craig, EB, 128, says there is no evidence to support Sarton's allegation that she had a short “affair” with Bowen. Sarton wrote about the incident with considerable sensitivity, acknowledging that Bowen's behavior was uncharacteristic. Bowen certainly understood the feelings that generated lesbian relationships. Her mother's death left her with a sympathy for the intensity that women sometimes show each other, for at thirteen losing her mother had seemed catastrophic. Moss, “EB,” 229, comments that “the Bowen preoccupation (but not obsession)” with love begins with “the missing mother.”

12. B. Bloom, Developing Talent in Young Children (New York: Ballantine, 1985), cited by Mihály Csikszentmihályi, “Society, Culture, and Person,” 338, has shown that gifted children require an “extensive support system” of parents and teachers if they are to reach their full potential. Alan Cameron clearly provided the kind of assistance that Bowen's parents had been unable to provide their daughter.

13. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss 3:159; E. Mapother and S. Anthony, cited by Felix Brown, “Bereavement and Lack of a Parent in Childhood,” 436; Pollock, “Aging,” 571. More recent studies, however, suggest that—depending on the abruptness of the death—the individual may or may not experience real distress in normal mourning. Those who are psychologically strong may “go through mourning relatively unshaken” (Daniel Goleman, “New Studies Find Many Myths about Mourning,” 17). Bowen clearly was affected by her loss; otherwise she would not have chosen the sort of husband that she did.

14. Curtis Brown, Foreword, xxxvi. Craig, EB, 117-18, points out that The Heat of the Day, Bowen's wartime novel, also presented a literary challenge, but not primarily an emotional one.

15. Robert N. Butler, “The Life Review,” 65, 67. Barbara Pym also created characters for whom she created a life review, rather than attempting to reexamine her own life (Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, Barbara Pym, 128-29).

16. Dinah has much in common with Ursula Vernon, a neighbor at Bowen's Court and contemporary, who seemed agelessly beautiful to Bowen. Lady Ursula's childhood had been as disrupted as Bowen's. Lady Ursula was equally “haunted”; the two became conspirators and enjoyed “rioting around” together, Lady Ursula's husband being in a wheelchair. Bowen dedicated LG to her (EB, 195-96, 220).

    In Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, 18, Will Barrett suffers from fugue states. Will periodically “wandered around … sunk in thought” when buried emotions from the past threaten to overpower him.

17. Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology for Women, 83; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 35. Hildebidle, Irish Writers, 99, n. 6, emphasizes the “theatrical” element in Bowen's work, her use of “clear stage-settings.” Miller theorizes that for many women even “the threat of disruption of connections is perceived not just a loss of a relationship but as something closer to a total loss of self” (83). LG also demonstrates the “intensely social and also moral nature of the young child's relation with others” (Carol Gilligan, “Adolescent Development Reconsidered,” ix). In that essay Gilligan cites John Mordecai Gottman's monograph (“How Children Become Friends,” Society for Research in Child Development Monograph 48, no. 3 [1983]) that demonstrates children have the ability to remember their friends even after long separations. Finally, Dinah's frantic pursuit also suggests the truth of Gilligan's observation (“Remapping the Moral Domain,” 11) that “attachments—located in time and arising from mutual engagement—are by definition irreplaceable.”

18. Clare herself bears some resemblance to the author: she wore large costume jewelry, which was Bowen's trademark, and adored Mrs. Piggott, Dinah's mother, just as Bowen had worshiped her own mother.

19. D. W. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” 150. For further discussion, see Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Nicholas Royle (pers. com., March 1, 1992) argues that the burial of a biscuit tin is equivalent to the packet of love letters in A World of Love (1955), but the burying ritual in LG refers directly to the death of Bowen's mother and the letters do not.

20. D. W. Winnicott, “Child Department Consultations,” 82, points out that reconstructing the story of a child's emotional development provides part of the cure. He emphasizes the paradox that the story is only complete when the analyst's reaction offers “the true recognition that all the pieces do weld together into a whole.”

21. Hildebidle, Irish Writers, 102; Pollock, “Aging,” 575.

22. Curtis Brown, Foreword, xxxix, describes the ensuing difficulty that Bowen's technical experiment caused her in composition.

23. Vaillant, Adaptation, 294.

24. Glendinning, EB, 95, reports that “the physical model for Eva Trout was glimpsed at an airport.”

25. Eva's early life has been as “rootless and declassé” as Portia's in The Death of the Heart (Ann Ashworth, “‘But Why Was She Called Portia?’” 160). Ashworth reports that when Portia is sent to live with her brother, she regards it as an exile, a place that offers the young girl no “means of attracting any but the most inappropriate matrimonial prospects.” Eva feels even more desperate at the Arbles; in Bowen's judgment her emotional deprivation is beyond repair.

26. Eva's and Jeremy's problems with speech are symptomatic of their bereft situation. Bowen suggests that Eva's inept use of language is the result of parental neglect. At the time Bowen wrote the novel she probably had in mind her own stammer, or perhaps her occasionally tortured syntax, which may have been the written equivalent of a stutter. Ironically, a few years after she completed ET, Bowen lost her voice completely from cancer of the lungs (EB, 238).

27. Sigmund Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty,” 88.

28. See Wyatt-Brown, Pym, 106-7. George H. Pollock, “Mourning and Memorialization through Music,” 424, argues that when creative people suffer grievous losses, “the direction of musical creativity and creativity in general will be influenced by intrapsychic processes of mourning and memorialization.”

29. Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men, 247, describes Winnicott's behavior. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence; Woodward, Aging, chap. 6.

The phrase “liberation of mourning” is adapted from George H. Pollock, “Aging or Aged,” 570, who argues that “the mourning-liberation process … has a creative outcome.” Earlier versions of parts of this essay appear in “Life Review in the Novels of Molly Keane, Elizabeth Bowen, and Peter Taylor” and “Eva Trout and the Return of the Repressed.”

R. B. Kershner made helpful comments and suggestions about this chapter. Nicholas Royle not only gave trenchant but useful criticisms of my chapter but brought theoretical essays on the crypt by Rand and Abraham and Torok to my attention.