[In the following essay, Miller praises Bowen's detailed representations of women and the wide range of settings and moral concerns she treated in her novels.]

The centenary of Elizabeth Bowen's birth fell neatly into the last year of the twentieth century and was celebrated with a reissuing of almost all her work in an ugly paperback edition, which is better than nothing. The books come with rather haphazardly chosen introductions, all flattering, though few of them quite avoid the sort of condescension she must have grown used to from even her most admiring critics. The current availability of so much of her writing—ten novels, a selection of essays, letters, and reviews, a collection of all the short stories that were published in seven separate volumes during her lifetime, her history of her family and of the house they inhabited for nearly 200 years in southern Ireland—does a good deal to counter the prevailing sense of her as a minor, romantic novelist. In this account, she wrote intelligently and elegantly out of a privileged woman's narrow experience, made more so by her upbringing in a family of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, living in the “Big House” and sustained by servants and indeed a whole class which figure only tangentially in her fiction.

She is not read much by the young, and though she is remembered with affection by many readers over sixty, she is often relegated to the category of what we read when we were young and callow (albeit with pleasure), and she is mildly tainted by this. Since her death in 1973 there has been more than one attempt to reassess her work and make sure that most of it is in print. There have been good biographies, by Victoria Glendinning in 1977 and Hermione Lee in 1981; and her friendships, with Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, among others, have been registered as important ones for those writers. John Bayley, in recalling Bowen's long friendship with Murdoch, was surprised and touched that the two women went in for what he calls “heart-to-hearts,” given Bowen's “powerful presence” and the “almost masculine reserve” of both women. Bayley had read all of Bowen's novels and stories “with immense pleasure, almost with passion” well before he met her.

Bowen has also been savaged, usually for being a woman writer of one kind or another. Elizabeth Hardwick (who “re-read” her in 1949) excoriated Bowen for her “oppressive tidiness of values,” her conservatism (and implied snobbery), which was no more in the end than “the moral intransigence of the interior decorator,” and her obsessive treatment of what Hardwick calls “the tragedy of the Fine Girl and the Impossible Man.” Hardwick admits that “the very equanimity of her work makes criticism difficult,” though this does not prevent her from concluding disparagingly that “these are obviously women's books,” lacking both irony and common sense. Bowen would have recognized this, I suspect, as the bruiser style of the Partisan Review at that time, written from a declared position of sympathy with “the underside of life” by a woman writer permitting herself and other women writers no special pleading. The piece has entailed some drummed up and tendentious reading, however. Raymond Williams, at the end of The Long Revolution (1961), used Bowen's The Heat of the Day as a striking example of what he actually defined as “the fiction of special pleading”:

The persons exist primarily as elements in the central character's emotional landscape, and are never seen or valued in any other terms, though there is no first-person narrative, and there is even some careful descriptive realism, to make the special pleading less stark. As it is now developing, the personal novel ends by denying the majority of persons. The reality of society is excluded, and this leads, inevitably, in the end, to the exclusion of all but a very few individual people.

In his later work Williams went on to perfect that sleight of hand which first excludes women's experience from the social realm and then castigates women for writing out of that exclusion. Williams, the excluder of women, complains that Bowen excludes most of the human race.

Both Anthony Burgess and Angus Wilson (who was to repent in his introduction to the first edition of her collected stories and was himself given something of a drubbing by Bowen for his first book, The Wrong Set) wrote of her as a typically “female novelist,” and Burgess complained especially that there was a lack of strong characters in her novels and that “the real protagonist is the sensibility of the author.” Nor has Bowen been rescued by feminist critics, beyond appearing on several lists of women writers who have not been given their due.

Returning to Bowen now (as some of those introducing her books have done), re-reading the best-known and, I still think, the best novels she wrote, between 1929 and 1949, but also reading some of her other work for the first time, I realize that I have condescended to her too. Perhaps that was a function of reading her while she was still writing. I had forgotten how different her novels are from each other and how ambitious; the range of their settings and preoccupations; how delicately she deals with moral dilemmas without the help of any of her contemporaries' big guns: political or religious conviction of the kind that could be taken on trust by contemporary readers, a reliance on sin or doom or revolutionary hope or disillusion, or even faith in new kinds of sensibility and the need for new forms of language and literature to match them. Her last three novels, A World of Love (1955) and, in the 1960s, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, are uncharacteristically awkward and playful attempts to find new themes and a more fractured, indeterminate way of writing, inspired, it has been said, by reading the younger writers Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark and wishing to emulate their “passion for the fictitious for its own sake.” It is a passion bestowed on the central women characters of all three novels, works which have been noticed by a number of contemporary critics for their early traces of postmodern developments in fiction. She might have been surprised by this. I find these novels disappointing, but there have been compensations in reading them. There is her wit and her gift for comedy, which survive the altogether baggier character of the later novels. There are her narrative gifts and her acute sense of history. She is a literary writer in the sense that she uses and transforms creatively what she takes from her favorites, Jane Austen, Henry James, and Proust, offering in the process clues to new readings of all of them. Her language is exact, supple, and rhythmical as it moves with swooping assurance from dialogue to commentary to description. She has a unique gift for the insides and outsides of houses and their light and landscapes (but not their decor, as it happens), and a sure hold on time in both its past (or even period) specificities and its terrifying capacity to transform lives and thought and feeling far into the future, and usually for the worse.

My re-reading has necessarily been forestalled by other people's. A. S. Byatt, for instance, records in her introduction to The House in Paris countless readings of the novel from the age of ten. Where I remember feeling out of sympathy with those articulate and unchildish children, waiting patiently if exasperatedly all day in the salon of that lugubrious house while we discover the story behind their being there, Byatt took them as vindication of “the private analyses I made to myself of things” and as exemplarily intelligent children among whom she felt at home. She even recalls her virtually adult, if not final, evaluation of the novel, when her own wider reading, particularly of Murdoch and F. R. Leavis, made her wonder for a time whether Bowen's novel was not “too much a work of ‘fine-drawn sensibility.’ It seemed too much the novel-as-object, inexorably shaped and limited by its own internal laws.”

I'm afraid I responded more tetchily in general than Byatt does to other aspects of the Bowen world, though these unnerve me now a good deal less than they once did. I used to wonder crossly about the life below stairs when asked to focus on an overwrought heroine picking at her breakfast tray. The servants in her novels are noticed in some cases and do become recognizable characters, though Bowen's efforts at working-class dialogue—a matter of being too literal with the use and meaning of clichés—are not successful. I worried too that her demon lovers were either half Jewish or just rather likely to be Jewish. And her novels (her short stories less so) are mostly about love (though they are also about betrayal) and especially about girls growing up in the English and Irish upper classes.

More important than all that, though, I realize that it was and is possible to read the best of Bowen's novels as if they were easy and no less silkily urbane than she sometimes makes them seem to be, and as uncritical of the world they inhabit as her characters can be. Her lightness of touch was always deceptive, and I was deceived. Women and children may be dealt the heaviest of blows, but they are so lightly, almost imperceptibly. These disastrous moments are swiftly enacted and in some cases completed well before the novel begins, and it is the residual damage from such events and the nature of the recovery from them which interest Bowen. In that sense she is not a dramatic novelist. Loss of parents, especially, but also treacheries in love and war, the subtly or even brutally inescapable manipulations of the older generation: it is these that cause enduring pain. The focus is on how this is borne, not on blame or retaliation or reversals.

There are, in fact, very few of the “weighty generalizations” abhorred by Elizabeth Hardwick and no “moral intransigence” that I can detect, though it is true that the author's persistent narrative voice in all the novels does determine the perspectives available to the reader, despite its somewhat laconic interventions. There is, of course, an intense focus on the individual's failure of heart, nerve, intelligence. It is possible to feel reproved by this, and the individual is more likely to be female than male. Bowen also took from Henry James and, especially, from Jane Austen the need to expend the same kind of loving attention on the “bad” characters as on the “good.”

After their first meeting, Virginia Woolf described Bowen as “stammering, shy, conventional,” and there is no question that reticence becomes more than a matter of style in her writing. It stands for habits of stoicism, but also for a difficulty women may have in voicing both their adherence to and divergence from prevalent male versions and values. Reticence can seem formidable or no more than the tactic of a stutterer; a tactic that may have been strengthened for Bowen by her mother's not letting her read or write until she was seven, a frustration that she remembered vividly. Such reticence is in any case worlds away from Angus Wilson's inept and gabbling parody of a composite Bowen/Woolf/Angela Thirkell text. Bowen's reticence extends to a holding back from judgment, so that we are usually expected to detect the gimcrack and the meretricious for ourselves. Moral imperatives are heard or refused with high-toned rationality and clipped eloquence, to become at times dangerously akin to a matter of good taste. Yet there are also occasions when characters are so wounded by treachery—their own or another's—that they choose to die.

Byatt recognized that these were complex and difficult novels when she was ten. I didn't and can only plead delayed development in this respect as in much else. In recognizing them now as demanding, I still see how easy it was to skate across their surfaces, assuming the acquiescence of the author in the cool elegance of some of her characters and their worlds. I should have been alerted by her comic scenes and clownish characters: the Oxford graduate too good for the job of secretary, Miss Tripp in To the North (neither Bowen nor Woolf had much time for girl graduates); the absurd letter Leopold's foster parents send to Paris with him (“We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology”); or the ebullient Daphne in The Death of the Heart who “slept voraciously” after a hard day's work at Smoot's circulating library:

It was clear that Daphne added, and knew that she added, cachet to Smoot's by her air of barely condoning the traffic that went on there. Her palpable wish never to read placed at a disadvantage those who had become dependent on this habit.

I could sometimes feel priggishly offended by one kind of Bowen heroine: that seemingly impassive woman, folded into her fur coat, a bunch of wilting violets pinned to her collar, constantly donning or removing hat and gloves as she wrestles with emotions in which I was quite ready to believe but which she was far too grand to justify or articulate, even to herself. Yet that same reticence enhanced the imperatives of sexual love, making such feeling almost tangible and certainly hard to gainsay. As it happens, the eighteen-year-old heroine of The Last September expresses a discomfort similar to mine as she secretly tries on an older woman's fur coat and glimpses for a moment its implications for her future. Bowen's girls and young women do not look forward to maturity—perhaps with good reason—and I didn't either.

I was fond of The House in Paris, though I liked To the North and The Death of the Heart even better. I remember finding the flashback, secret love affair at the center of the Paris novel especially erotic, and the lovers' meetings in Boulogne and then Hythe have stayed with me vividly enough to render the cross-channel ferry, with its laborious train journeys on either side, a means of transport which still provides somewhat improbable sexual promise. Unlike Byatt, however, I am conscious of misremembering important things about that novel. I had forgotten that there are two terrifying mothers in the book, one monstrous and melodramatic in her manipulation of her daughter's life and love; the other, however, just as malevolent an influence in her pursed-lip distaste for her daughter's Jewish lover, so subtly patrician and downplayed, too grand even to speak her disapproval. To deliver through your own death rather than commonplace admonition the coup de grace to any future your daughter might recover for herself is evidence enough of overbearing ill will.

Elizabeth Bowen lived through both world wars, through the Irish “troubles” and the Anglo-Irish War between 1919 and 1921, and her novels and stories are embedded in these and other historical specificities. In a short memoir of her English boarding school she wrote,

The war having well outlasted my schooldays, I cannot imagine a girl's school without a war. The moral stress was appalling. We grew up under the intolerable obligation of being fought for, and could not fall short in character without recollecting that men were dying for us.

“The war dwarfed us,” she wrote, “and made us morally uncomfortable.” The girls never discussed the war or men for fear of causing each other pain or embarrassment. Such memories may contain the seeds of her writing about war and also of her moral aspirations for women. So long as “the past does certainly seem to belong to men,” women's participation in the patrician values of rationality, courage, honesty, and discretion was necessarily bound to develop in relation to a world organized around men's actions and decisions. She disliked and distrusted feminism and referred to Woolf's feminism as “a bleak quality, an aggressive streak, which can but irritate, disconcert, the adorer of Virginia Woolf the artist.” This was in part a hatred of platforms or of anything smacking of the partisan. Her novels are, of course, centrally about women and how they manage to live their lives among the men they love or like, who are all too apt to let them down. This is not allowed as an excuse for self-pity, but it is pivotal to her plots and characters. She was as hostile to any special pleading for women as were Elizabeth Hardwick and Raymond Williams.

In The Heat of the Day, Stella has to discover what she is to say and do about her lover's spying for the enemy in the Second World War. The narrator's eye is not on why Robert has decided to spy (indeed, the explanation for this is a bit perfunctory) but on whether Stella should trust the man she loves or the sinister man who tells her that he is a spy. Like her lover, she has lied to people: pretending that she left her husband, when in fact he left her. Her secret is that she has no confidence in herself as a woman, both because her husband did not love her and because her ordeal entails admitting to second-rate or parasitic deceptions, the more humiliating for being about saving face, avoiding embarrassment: and all arising from her relations with men. Her anxieties and uncertainties spring from “the ambiguities of her tie with Robert. … She, like he, had come loose from her moorings; but while what she had left behind her dissolved behind her, what he had left behind him was not to be denied.” Class, family history, and educated intelligence constitute some of the “moorings” that have been disrupted and unsettled by war, and women live a particular version of this disruption. Stella believes that her class is all she has ever had going for her. Precisely because of their dependence on men women have a greater need to think for themselves, a situation seen by Bowen's women characters as simultaneously diminishing and demanding. The ambiguity of their position makes women particularly vulnerable to the blandishments of a “worldliness beginning so deep down that it seems to be the heart.” Courage has to be defined by each woman left at home on her own during the war. Stella, Connie, Louie in The Heat of the Day have in common their relation to men, but their dilemmas are different.

Women's hearts may get broken by men, and they either learn to live with this or they wither as human beings, even die. Bowen's ambition for women is that they will achieve balance: they will learn control and worldly understanding, while continuing to feel, trust, love, and respond, though it is hardly ever possible to do both. Emmeline dies with her lover in To the North, more or less deliberately crashing her car on the A10 because she cannot see a way through his betrayal and her pain. Until she falls in love with Markie, she has been absorbed by her work in an eccentric travel agency and gently intrigued by her friends. She has kept her balance, but has risked nothing. She is destroyed by what she perceives as the grotesque discontinuity between her cool public persona and her confused inner life, but also by her own reticence, her inability to voice the dilemma of loving a man she disapproves of and who has betrayed her exactly as they both knew he would. The mistake has been hers, not his. He came clean to her, with his “If I shot anyone, I am the sort of man I should shoot.” Emmeline's elegance and charm, and her particular accommodations to worldliness, trap her into silence and solitude.

Where women survive—and most of them do—they learn from their elders about compromise. Bowen novels thrive on the presence of her older women, who are comic, silly, or morally coarse, or all three at once, but who have their feet on the ground and are in a position to offer warnings to their daughters, nieces, and orphan wards. Though they are disregarded for the most part as a clamorous chorus, they are usually implicated in what goes wrong for the younger generation. In The Death of the Heart, for instance, the question is how the simple and ignorant sixteen-year-old Portia, brought up by incompetent and foolish parents, is to learn to think and feel in a world where adults are bound to fail her. She is bequeathed as an orphan to a much older half brother living with his wife, Anna, in a beautifully ordered house in Regent's Park. Portia disturbs this glossy life and is hurt by it. Anna is “already half way through a woman's checked, puzzled life, a life to which the intelligence only gives a further distorted pattern.” Portia is by no means “a fine girl” indulged by the author, but then neither is Anna, who is, in fact, a finely understood egotist, whose depredations are disconcertingly airy, weightless, almost imperceptible, and extremely hard to combat.

It is not that the men in the novel live fuller, more satisfying lives, but that their accommodations with destiny can be predicted and taken for granted in a way that women's cannot. Morally, women are on their own. Anna has cultivated forgetfulness—of love, doubt, pain—in order to maintain the surface of her present life. It is a seductive choice for a woman, but it entails injustice to her younger self and to Portia. The novel puts Portia through hilarious as well as agonizing trials, which she commits to her diary and which Anna disastrously reads. Portia records without comment the items of a belated education: daily lessons on “hygiene” and “We were to have had a lecture on the Appreciation of Mozart, but because of the fog we had a Debate on Consistency being the Hobgoblin of Small Minds. We also wrote essays on Metternich's policy.” Anna skims these entries to alight on Portia's admission that she is in love with Eddie, a brilliantly slippery creature already teasingly in love with Anna. He is usually read as a portrait of Goronwy Rees, friend of the spies Burgess and Maclean and briefly, it seems, Bowen's lover. The novel is a wonderful evocation of the effects of worldliness on both the worldly and the innocent, and it manages, probably more than any of the other novels, to explore the relation between the two, recalling moments and characters from Mansfield Park and, perhaps, The Wings of the Dove, while setting its characters firmly in a prewar 1938 London which becomes transformed, in The Heat of the Day, to London in wartime.

Elizabeth Bowen was born into the landed gentry. Her family, originally from Wales, had lived in County Cork since a Colonel Bowen accompanied Cromwell to the south of Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century and was rewarded with lands in the northeastern part of the county. In her history of her family house, Bowen's Court, she makes much of the fact that the “severely classical” house was built in 1775, the year “George Washington faced George III of England, when Henry Cole Bowen watched the date cut and saw the last slate set in Bowen's Court roof, Anglo Ireland knew her power and felt her spirit move”; though, as she puts it, “the small town of Alexandria in Virginia is now a neat noble shrine, and Mallow in County Cork is now a decayed spa.” Her insistence on these connections and on the deflating differences signals the hope (however imperialist) for a new world, but also the long-term repercussions for England of the two defections, the one in Ireland dangerously mimicking the one in Virginia. The grandeur she invokes for the family's history and for the house is always ambiguous. Her family were settlers, bosses, and outsiders in a country they loved and came to regard as their home. They were insulated from the Catholic Irish, while thinking of themselves, nonetheless, as entirely Irish. Their Englishness was a great deal more problematic to them. Yet the physical rootedness of this inheritance was always also something of a mirage. Especially so for Bowen herself, who, after her father's breakdown when she was seven and her mother's death when she was thirteen, became the kind of homeless orphan she wrote about. She went to school in England and lived there both as a child and as an adult for much of her life. But she inherited Bowen's Court and worked to maintain it as a home until 1959. Memories and photographs abound in books about her friends and in her own of the holidays and weekends she managed to provide for them. Virginia Woolf recalled her only visit there in 1934 in characteristically contemptuous detail:

There is no architecture of any kind: all the villages are hideous; built entirely of slate in the year 1850: so Elizabeth's home was merely a great stone box, but full of Italian masterpieces and decayed 18th century furniture, and carpets all in holes—however they insisted upon keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on.

Within a year of Bowen's selling the house in 1959 its new owner had demolished it.

Bowen's Court is a history of the Anglo-Irish presence in southern Ireland. It is marked by what has been thought of as a Burkean conservatism, a buoyant delight in survival and continuity, and it is also informative about the Irishness of these families and the peculiarities of their complex and changing identities during their 300 years in Ireland. Bowen starts her history from its unique landscape and past, and the book comes alive as she populates the house and then the land and hills and surrounding towns and villages, imagining the lives and characters of her ancestors as always impinged on by their surroundings and changing over time. Her best wartime short stories have this same sense of houses and rooms which are redolent of the world they hold at bay and contain: spaces that explain their inhabitants and propel their stories.

During the Second World War, Elizabeth Bowen was officially employed by the British Government to report on the mood and attitudes of the Irish. In his Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, Roy Foster quotes from one of her reports:

I find a great readiness, in talkers of all classes, to stress the “spirituality” of … Éire's attitude towards world affairs. At the root, this is not bogus: that this country is religious in temperament and disposition as well as practice is, I take it, an accepted fact. Unhappily, religion is used to cover or bolster up a number of bad practices. I … still see a threat of Catholic-Fascism. And officially the Irish R.C. Church is opposed to progress, as not good for the people.

The most disagreeable aspect of this official “spirituality” is its smugness, even phariseeism. I have heard it said (and have heard it constantly being said) that “the bombing is a punishment on England for her materialism.” … And there is still admiration for Franco's Spain. … The effect of religious opinion in this country (Protestant as well as Catholic) seems still to be, a heavy trend to the Right.

From the conversations she had in Ireland she derived an analysis which is recognizable, subtle and fair-minded. The Heat of the Day and the stories published in 1945 as The Demon Lover are often bracketed with Graham Greene's writing about the war and with something like surprise that a woman writer should be thought of in such company. She was a friend of his and would have winced, I suspect, at comparison. It is impossible not to feel, however, how wonderfully strong and unheroic her picture is of living in London during the worst of the bombing and afterwards, and how persuasive her treatment of treachery, from grand treason to the smallest disloyalties, as she writes not of grandiose tussles with God and conscience, or even with sex and drink, but of the effects of war on families and friendships and on individuals. She is surely a finer writer on war, as she is on love, than Graham Greene was. Her fiction enacts disparities, tensions, and, as a consequence, the hopeless inevitability of treacheries, just as Greene's does. But where he needs original sin to enliven sex and even to explain war, and priests to provide a commentary, Bowen sets her characters within the history and the landscape that produced them and still expects them to take responsibility for who they are.

Bowen's favorite of all her novels—and probably mine too—was an early one, her second, published in 1929. The Last September contrasts the gathering “troubles” of Ireland in 1920 with the seemingly aimless late summer days of a group of friends and family staying in a house very like the one Bowen herself grew up in. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor welcome their old friends the Montmorencys, an ill-suited couple with no home, who do a lot of visiting. Lois, an eighteen-year-old niece, and Laurence, her “very intellectual” cousin, stay with the Naylors during school and university holidays. Lois is an orphan, rather vaguely destined for art school, as Bowen was, and this is to be thought of as her last summer holiday before the beginning of adult life. There is an edginess to the party; the bedrooms have thin walls and conversations are overheard. Mrs. Montmorency is older than her handsome husband and she remembers being snubbed by Lois's mother in the past.

The young English subalterns garrisoned in Bowen's fictional Clonmore provide dancing partners and potential fiancés for Lois and her friends and are reminders of the attractions Meryton provides in Pride and Prejudice for Lydia and Catherine after the arrival there of a militia regiment, resting from, but also destined for, the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, the effect of reading about Cork in the early 1920s is to return for a moment to Lydia's fate in Austen's novel and to recognize it as appalling, even if she deserved it. In Bowen's novel there are patrols and shootings. Several local Catholics known to the inhabitants of the big house have gone into hiding and are wanted men. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor object to their niece flirting with Gerald, one of the English officers. Snobbery vies with anti-English feeling as motive for their objections. They have sympathy with their Irish Catholic neighbors, even if they occupy a different world. No love is lost between Lady Naylor and the English army wives, who are sure the Naylors are going down in the world—as sure, indeed, as Woolf was to be that Bowen's Court had already done so. But that doesn't dent Lady Naylor's urbanity, which ordains that there be no ugly rejections or uncivilized quarrels, though she is entirely determined to get her way.

No, he of course is charming, but he seems to have no relations. One cannot trace him. His mother, he says, lives in Surrey, and of course you do know, don't you, what Surrey is? It says nothing, absolutely; part of it is opposite the Thames Embankment. Practically nobody who lives in Surrey ever seems to have been heard of, and if one does hear of them they have never heard of anybody else who lives in Surrey. Really altogether, I think all English people very difficult to trace.

She is suspicious of his class, his lowly rank in the Army, his lack of money. But her deeper suspicions are of his Englishness and of what the army is up to in Ireland. She treats him with lethal civility, and in warning him against any thought of marrying Lois, breaks his heart. He is almost instantly shot and killed in an ambush, and the novel ends with the burning down of three big houses in the area. The Naylors' house is one of them. Like most of Bowen's novels, this is finally tragic, though so much of its material has been light, mannered, comic. The end of youth, of innocence, of peace, even of ignorance is a sad business for Bowen. We are not asked to weep, but to understand. This novel, indeed all Bowen's fiction, is unsentimental and free of bombast and inflated emotion.

My recent return to Elizabeth Bowen's writing was prompted by a chance (first) reading of Friends and Relations, published in 1931 and usually thought of as one of her slighter works. Short and spare as it is, it has, nonetheless, a bizarrely strong kick to it. Woven into the egregiously trivial social lives of two sisters from a county family, now married and with children, is the revelation that one of them, Janet, has always been in love with her sister Laurel's husband, Edward, and he, though less enthusiastically, with her. In the midst of the gentlemanly pursuit of jobs and pleasures, while the women shop and lunch, Janet and Edward admit their love for each other and renounce it. Janet spends a discreet day or two in bed getting over it all. In the background are a chorus of beady adolescents and an older couple, now just friends, whose adulterous affair once tore into the lives of their children, one of whom was Edward. Tragedy is averted in this generation and passionate love is domesticated and contained. The effect of the novel is to demonstrate how such feeling and such containment of feeling change people's lives. The pressure on the couple to turn their backs on love has come not from a moralistic author but from their own possibly unreliable sense of the exigencies of family life and of Edward's terror of doing to his children what was done to him.

Virginia Woolf, who was Elizabeth Bowen's friend, if not always her most generous reader, wrote to her about The House in Paris, “I had the feeling that your world imposed itself on my world, while I read, which only happens when one is being taken in hand by a work.” Bowen deserves that sort of testimonial. She wrote about women among men and with men, and in most of her writing women speak and are spoken for in more depth and detail than men are. It is hard to see why this should make her less of a writer than her male contemporaries.