SOURCE: Coates, John. “The Recovery of the Past in A World of Love.” Renascence 40, no. 4 (summer 1988): 226-46.

[In the following essay, Coates disputes critics who characterize A World of Love as a “lovely” novel with little substance, contending that the work deals with some of the most significant concerns of twentieth-century life.]

It has often been suggested, quite correctly, that A World of Love (1955) recapitulates themes familiar from Elizabeth Bowen's earlier novels such as the nature and power of innocence and the awakening of an inexperienced girl to worldly knowledge or possibly to worldly corruption. There is also agreement on a second and much more disputable point. One of the book's first reviewers, Rose Macaulay, talked of its “feathery and oblique feminine portraiture” and denied that it had a topic or a theme since its author was “far more tentative than that” (132). Patricia Craig's recent study echoes this view; “All mood and no plot, you could say … All very lovely and effulgent however” (130). One would not need to be a professed feminist to find such a tradition of comment patronising and dismissive.

A World of Love is, rather, concerned through a self-conscious and at times ironic re-working of myth, to examine some of the most significant “public” themes of the twentieth century. These themes include the nature and the consequences of an immense social and cultural fracture, a loss of the past as the result of historical cataclysm rather than of slow change or inevitable decay. Guy's death in the First World War is not an incidental detail of the plot or the fate of a single individual, however romantic or significant in the private lives of a number of survivors. What Rose Macaulay describes as a “fine long passage on death as distinct from deadness” (132) is, in fact, much more than that. It is a meditation on a familiar yet inexhaustible subject, the social and psychological effect of the gutting of a generation of moral and intellectual talent. Reflecting on her cousin's death, Antonia concludes that the “two wars” have raised their query “to our sense of finality” (44). What seemed a “law of nature” has been challenged since it is no longer possible to young life cut off in battle as “the fruition of a destiny.” Guy had taken the idea of being killed “lightly” (45) with the debonair courage of his age and background. He had not envisaged “deadness” as a state. As a result, his “lease” on the ensuing years did not run out. The living were “incomplete” without him.

The importance of this passage lies not only in what it says of the effect of Guy's death on his immediate family but, even more, in its careful emphasis on the representative nature of that death. Guy's fate was typical. The emotional damage such death caused and the questions they raised set the tone of a whole period. The Second World War completed the psychological fracture and “peopled the world with another generation of the not-dead” (45) troubling the minds of the living with a sense of “unlived lives.” Antonia, tormented, enigmatic and very much an individual, is, at the same time, firmly located within a general historical frame of reference. She “and others younger” (45) are creatures of an “impossible time” breathing a “wronged air” which is either “too empty or too full.” Almost equally important is the definition offered in this same passage of the “innocence” of Lilia's daughter Jane. Here again, the text emphasizes the historical and cultural explanation. Since she “had come late” Jane is at “no known disadvantage.” She has grown up far enough away from the wrecked past and from the sense of aborted possibilities not to be damaged by them. Rather she seems an “alien” (45) to Antonia, on the other side of a great divide of thought and sensibility.

One of the most interesting features of A World of Love is a tension, almost a contradiction, between a thread of imagery which implies the archetypal or the inevitable, and a carefully defined historical and psychological context which insists on individual choice and denies historical inevitability. The novel is dominated by images which enforce a sense of decay, the traditional emblems of a landowner's decline, the felling of trees, the door that “no longer knew hospitality” (9), the overgrown avenue, the sealed up window, the broken wall of the garden. These are the well-worn, but residually effective metaphors of fairy-tale or legend. Montfort has something of Sleeping Beauty's crumbling castle or a mythic Waste Land whose fertility has been blighted by a “young god's” death. However, the train of association of such images is raised only to be scrutinised and challenged. It is a natural, but too easy a way of viewing the characters' predicament. Deliberately the novel sets the reflections of Lilia, Guy's fiancee, in the overgrown garden. The flower-beds run to seed and the crumbling walls might have reflected simply the perennial theme of time's dissipation of all orders, hierarchies, values, distinctions, knowledge and power. Yet this is not the case. The mood is not the one the imagery impels us towards, one of elegy. Rather it is shaped by Lilia's own thoughts, being tormented and bewildered. It refuses to accommodate itself to a ready-made pattern of acceptance.

Montfort is haunted not by memories but by “expectations” (97). As in Antonia's earlier reflections on Guy's death and the deaths of the twentieth century, the point is made that a range of possibility was ended, a story broken off. What might have happened? What would have been the end of that personal story and, by implication, that political and social history?

In Lilia's view it was only with the loss of Guy's “master touch of levity, nerve or infatuation” (97) that the garden and Montfort itself began “undeniably” to decay. The hesitation between the two possibilities, the two futures, inherent in “nerve” or “infatuation” is highly significant. Guy's sudden and violent death left unanswered the great question of “whether he could consolidate” (97) Montfort's threatened identity or traditions and carry them on into changing times. Moreover, his very panache, his promise of a quality of life, a “dreamed of extreme of being” (97) stirred up too much in others. Since those who survive “dread to decline” from the particular quality he once saw in them, they cannot grow, change, adapt, or what is synonymous with these, live. The bitter and bickering relationship of Antonia and Lilia is built on the “unfinished story” (51) of Guy. Virtually nothing else of significance “had happened to them since their two girlhoods.”

A World of Love suggests a second pattern of explanation or mode of feeling about its characters and, again, challenges it. The novel provides ample evidence of a specific historical and economic process, the decline of a former ruling class, the Anglo-Irish “Ascendancy” as if inviting the reader to consider how much this process explains the characters' sufferings. Along with a loss of the Ascendancy's wealth and prestige, there is a second loss, subsidiary and concomitant, of belief in its own codes, traditions and totems. The inscription on the obelisk has been obliterated (10), its presumably heroic meaning erased. More significantly, the detritus on the bedside of Antonia, Montfort's owner, includes a packet of Gold Flake, a Bible, a glass with dregs, matches, sunglasses, sleeping pills (10). The Protestantism which gave Anglo-Irish rule its justification in its own eyes and its coherence, even in the eyes of those who hated it, has visibly crumbled. The “priceless treasure of God's Word” joins the means of escape from boredom, perhaps from life. To reinforce the point, the novel later emphasizes the devalued status of the Bible. Maud, Lilia's younger daughter, leafs “through the Psalms” (105) for maledictions to pour out on her father. These curses are, apparently, apt enough comments on the fate of a former ruling class (“let another take his office” or “let the stranger spoil his labour”). Maud's motive for her sinister scriptural ceremony is far more significant, however. She required “life to be patriarchal” (111) and “could not forgive” (112) her father for his human weakness, his burst of emotion over Guy's letters, and his inability, both temperamental and economic, to sustain the role of Protestant landowner and ruler in “his own house” (110). Maud seems mirrored in a minor, partly comic fashion, the contradictions and self-hatred in her elders' situations. Interestingly, she “confines her attacks to her co-religionists” (110) in the Protestant school bus, sowing dissension among the children of her own faith, while never attacking a Catholic child.

However, like the images which invite surrender into a mood of elegy, the notion of a general socio-economic “explanation” is made to seem simplistic. It is offered only to be questioned. The situation of the Anglo-Irish, intruders in an alien land, is not in itself unnatural. Rather, Antonia reflects, it is a paradigm of the condition of man. Not since Montfort was built “had there ceased to be vigilant measures against the nightcomer” (79). This “hostile watch” may have been directed against a potentially rebellious population, yet, after all, “everywhere is a frontier” where the “outpost few,” the “living,” must never be off their guard. One recalls Elizabeth Bowen's comment in “The Big House,” an essay of some years earlier, that the struggles of the owners of great Irish houses to maintain themselves were part of a struggle which goes on everywhere and that “may be said, in fact, to be life itself.” (5)

The dissonant signals in the text of A World of Love serve several purposes. They are repudiations of a facile assimilation of particular experience to generalised patterns, whether those patterns are elegiac myth or those of some historical “inevitability.” Such explanations are alluded to, but the point is deliberately made that they do not cover all the facts. The contradictions are also a device to secure an increased attention to particular experience. They impel the reader to unravel an economic, historical and emotional web, rather than simply snatching at one thread from it.

The novel first carefully establishes the curious financial relationship Antonia has with Fred and Lilia Danby, who manage Montfort. The Danbys' status “never secure, never defined” (13) originated in an act of patronage the narrative explicitly condemns as “fatal,” (15) by which Antonia almost adopted her dead cousin Guy's fiancée, “girl of virtually her own age” (15). Guy's courtship had already whirled Lilia “out of her natural sphere.” This last phrase has an awkward uncompromising ring about it, the air of a deliberate challenge to some readers' assumptions. Its meaning is best seen in economic terms. Antonia's “adoption” of her means that Lilia is not “disposed to try” (15) to work for her living. If she had been left to her own devices, life might have forced her “on to her own feet.” Besides, Antonia's help does not take any regular or dependable form. It is sufficient only to produce “apathy” and “profound mistrust” in her dependent.

Antonia's mixed motives in the affair are made very clear. Her initial and, at least consciously, sincere feeling that it was “unfair” that Guy had accidentally failed to provide for Lilia was combined later, in ways she appears never to have examined, with her own need for financial expedients to retain Montfort. Her decision that the only answer to Lilia's “incurably negative destiny” (15) is to “marry her off” to Fred, Antonia's illegitimate cousin, sets up a thoroughly unfair and exploitative situation. Lilia and Fred live at and manage Montfort without either security as tenants or regular wages as housekeepers. Their position combines the worst of pre-industrial and of modern societies. It involves slip-shod, almost eighteenth-century use of the “lower orders” without the sense of a natural social hierarchy which made such behaviour seem inevitable in its day. Antonia, with a cool archaistic insolence, informs Fred that “a woman went with the land” (16). Yet, of course, it must be said that the Danbys fall in with the arrangement Antonia proposes and, having done so, show a curious inability to get away from Montfort. Both Fred's (15-16) and Lilia's (92-93) breaks for freedom prove abortive, Fred drifting back without plans, Lilia being “reclaimed” from London like so much lost property. While it is possible to see this in emotional terms, it has an economic and social dimension. The Danbys are the victims but also the beneficiaries of an anachronistic view of property and family which, in spite of its manifest faults, offers them a context or a role which the atomised contemporary world does not. In a sense, Lilia and Fred provide Antonia with the traditional remedy of the poverty-stricken landowner, the employment for low or no wages of the “extended family.” Fred had, even as a boy, been taken away from school because of his “usefulness about the place” (15).

However, Antonia's “crisis of worry” (16) about Montfort has certain special, not merely traditional features. At first sight, her complaint about the “fecklessness or ill will of the grazing tenants” (16) seems to reflect the perennial problems of the alien landowner unable to establish a satisfactory relationship with an originally conquered tenantry. Nevertheless, the novel makes clear, Antonia's problems stem at least as much from inconsistencies within her own attitude to her role as Montfort's owner as from any general “post-colonial” factors. Her “overweening sentiment” (14) for the estate is combined with the lack of either will or ability to remain on it. Her visits are sudden and generally “far-apart” (14).

Antonia's disintegration at the Hunt Fête throws more light on her complex combination of economic and emotional dilemmas. This annual Fête has a special importance for the Anglo-Irish landowning community. Almost all groups, societies or classes have rituals, ceremonies, gatherings which reinforce their identity and their sense of themselves. For the Anglo-Irish it is “our gaiety” (36) which drew “the entire county.” For the inhabitants of Montfort it is the one festivity of the lonely year. Yet it “requires nerve” from all of them. At first Antonia throws herself into the occasion in a brittle tour-de-force performance. In an overwrought effort of will she strikes attitudes, “hatless, bejewelled, flashing her black glasses, spotting friends, capping sentiments, barking greetings.” This disturbing scene underlines a point which lies at the heart of Antonia's situation. Her role-playing, which does indeed impress the crowd at the Fête, is not that of the owner of Montfort. Rather, it is that of “her part of fame,” the reputation acquired early in life as an “artist-photographer.” She has pursued this career, retained her “name” and is reputed to “still be making money.” Away from Montfort Antonia has enjoyed a real, perhaps an outstanding, success. The rumour or suggestion of some source of income, other than from the land, is what interests the circle of those “who still knew her.” This is natural enough, since, we are to assume, it is this income, together with her utilizing of Lilia's and Fred's labour, that has (just) kept Montfort going (28-9).

The scene illustrates, above all, the destructive contradiction inherent in Antonia's roles. She will not live permanently in her Irish country house, spending her talent and energy in making the best of the estate. Yet neither can she cut her emotional and financial losses by giving Montfort up and devoting herself wholeheartedly to a life away from it. One of the oddest minor features of the narrative is the haphazard information given towards the end of the novel that Antonia had once had a brief “out of character try at marriage” (135) as she had “tried most things.” Something, some failure of steadiness or inner repose prevents her “tries” from being more than forays into experience. She will not or cannot persist or work at them.

Antonia's dilemma is epitomised by her collapse in the middle of all her hysterical brilliance at the Fête. She trips over a tentpeg, jars “the lense in her brain” and, “sick” of everything demands to be taken home. The phrase is peculiarly suggestive. Antonia's social manner is not a means of communication but a method of presentation which draws on the studied perfectionism she has learned in her photographic work.

Antonia's consciousness is, in fact, that modern one, which as has been noted was defined in Elizabeth Bowen's essay “Manners” (1937). Beyond the age of manners there is “no guide”; the “so-called free, or intelligent society imposes a constant tax on all the powers” (6). The owner of Montfort shares with Thomas and Anna in The Death of the Heart a lack of ease and amplitude, of “family custom” and that pleasurable awareness of the past which gives a casual grace and confidence to social relations. The paradox is that Antonia is living not in a heartless hygenic London house but in an Irish manor such as the one Roderick had seen as his salvation and an alternative to contemporary emptiness in The Heat of the Day.

Both Antonia and Lilia are condemned to haunt the place where a life different from that of the present once existed. Although her brittle self-consciousness is a denial of everything its life was, or could have been, Antonia hangs on to Montfort, partly because the embittered assertion of fragments and memories remains the most positive choice open to her in the contemporary world. It is made clear throughout the novel that this world revolves, quite simply, around money and the display of money. When Antonia collapses and deserts her at the Fête which “one paid money to enter,” Lilia can only resort “to spending money” on a succession of trashy, unwanted purchases in a kind of parody of the ethic of material consumption practiced by her rich neighbour Lady Latterly. Perhaps she feels it is the only way to make any kind of impression since, as she bitterly remarks later, the local inhabitants “do nothing but nose out our money” (88). After the Fête, the Montfort party speculates on what their neighbours takings were and whether, since the country's rotten with money, they could have a Fête themselves. The grotesque Lady Latterly, “chatelaine” of an “unusually banal Irish castle” in the vicinity, epitomizes this new, naked dominance of wealth and display. Complimented on the speed with which the Fête was cleared up, she replies that she pays “all these men; why should they not work” (55). The relationship is as simple as that. Her “reputed fortune” (57) and the saga of her useless, disaster-prone expenditure on house-parties, herbaceous borders, swimming-baths, servants and lovers, all imported into the Irish countryside, naturally interests her neighbours. As Mr. Lonergan, the Clonmore grocer, remarks in awe, she may soon be “moving among the crowned heads” (58). She herself enjoys retailing accounts of “delays, non-deliveries, breakages, leakages” (57) out of “vauntingness.” After all, they prove what her resources are equal to, which is the essential point. She may be “a nouveau riche” but, as Antonia remarks with a mixture of sarcasm and obvious envy, “better late than never” (57).

Lady Latterly carries to its most extreme point the modern misanthropy, noted elsewhere in the novel; a combination of the lack of any real social ease or pleasure with the need to stage occasional tour-de force performances. She dreads the arrival of her guests, “these bastards” (57). “Loathing the beginning of a party” (59), she needs some “device” to aid her “showmanship,” itself a more successful variant of Antonia's performance at the Fête because it rests on a firmer economic foundation. Part of the effect and presumably of the reason for the portrayal of Lady Latterly is to suggest that the urge to display and the money-consciousness which form a part of Antonia's complex character are not some personal idiosyncrasy. Instead they are an enforced and in some ways an unwilling and embittering tribute to what she, correctly, recognizes as the ethos of the time. A World of Love insists on the parallels between the social malaise at Montfort and the social malaise elsewhere.

The index of sickness in A World of Love is the same one, homely yet effective, used in earlier novels of Elizabeth Bowen. The attitude of individuals to the furniture and decor of their homes is a measure of their attitude to the material world and of their power to create and enjoy. The instinct that, in a rudimentary form, arranges ornaments in a complex form builds civilizations. Like Stella's flat in The Heat of the Day or Eddie's room in The Death of the Heart, the interiors of Montfort reflect a lack of order or joy in those who live in them. A striking passage describes how Lilia, unable to impose her own style or ideas on the Montfort drawing room, turns in a spirit of “negative vengeance” (31) against “what she found there.” Ornaments, some of considerable value, (Bohemian goblets and Dresden cupids) are no longer shown casually for the pleasure they give. Since Lilia thinks they “collect dust,” she banishes them to cabinets where they “dolefully disappear” as museum objects instead of remaining as part of a living social world or culture. More significantly, Lilia has pushed apart the “chattery circle” of chairs in a “condemnatory spirit”—a rejection of an intimacy based on a confidence nobody in the present possesses. Yet, Lady Lattery, who certainly has none of Lilia's or Antonia's financial worries, displays the same uncaring, almost destructive attitude to the objects and atmosphere of her home. She leaves the chairs in her room in an “open yet closed half-circle” (62) oriented towards a cold fireplace. Here her guests disappear “almost supine.” Yet there is one significant difference between her rich home and Montfort. Lady Latterly “would have done well to rearrange her room but had not thought of it” (62). At Montfort “the tide might turn” (31). Jane, Lilia's and Fred's elder daughter, has restored “a pair of pink cornucopias” in the drawing room. “Some other hand” has placed “a large and lovely unframed photograph,” one of Antonia's studies of Jane herself, on the mantlepiece. Even Lilia, after the latest of her annual defeats at the Fête, feels she might in her own way restore its lost atmosphere. Lilia pictures her amber bowl on the mantlepiece, but unable to remember where it is, “lost heart.” Yet, one feels, the decision might just have gone the other way.

Montfort is half-living or living under a curse. It is not, like Lady Latterly's castle with its pastiche decor, dead and scoured clean of the past. Fragments of memory, the persistent feeling of the loss of some better way of living, accounts for the pain of Montfort. But its pain is the proof of its life and, possibly, the promise of some kind of restoration. Behind the Waste Land images of seeded grass “between the cobbles” of slime “greenly caked” in the empty troughs of dryness and dessication, is the feeling of a missing but real significance. Its very lack is, like the absence of a Deus Absconditus, a paradoxical proof of its existence. Jane senses that “above her something other than the clouds was missing from the uninhabited sky.” The limits of knowledge have not been reached in this blighted house. “One was on the verge, however, possibly, of more” (43).

In the portrait of Antonia the novel makes one of its firmest assertions that the suffering of Montfort is the proof of continued life. This awkward, unhappy, at time unbearable woman has a distinction which cannot be denied. Her face, despite its show of indolence, has “something energetic” about it; its tensions and shadows are “speaking ones.” The contrarieties and strains in her nature are tokens that she has not forgotten and will not surrender the substance of certain experiences, responses and expectations about living, even if these seem irrelevant to a present grinding them down. She may be unhappy, or even at times cruel, but “what was in her stayed unresigned, untaught” (38). There are continuously placed hints in her behaviour of another half-submerged code or style. In contrast, for example, to the constant querulousness, the complaints about inadequate service which are the corollary of Lady Latterly's contemporary “money values,” Antonia is “gentlemanly” (56) or “rational” in her attitude to small failures or minor inefficiencies. She may be “destructive” (36) but she is not petty. She cannot “be bothered taking it out on anyone … in smaller ways.” She feels, besides, that her “aristocratic” values, although imperative, are incommunicable to others. When Lilia asks “Why should I not,” in response to her suggestion that she “shouldn't brood” (42), Antonia replies in an off-hand tone, “I could hardly tell you.” There is no rational justification for dignity or stoicism. It is simply good form to practice them.

However, the act of recovering the lost past, or at least that part of it which can serve the life of the present, does not fall to Antonia, who preserves a conscious connection with it. It falls instead to Jane, who has no such connection. A World of Love insists on the unexpected, the unpredictable. The Waste Land imagery, the mournful, slightly theatrical evocations, seem to announce inevitable decay; yet, inevitability is explicitly repudiated. The use of Jane as the vehicle of the effect of Guy's letters, and the recipient of a message from the past is, again, a deliberate challenge to expectation. Fred's elder daughter is a living embodiment of the historical divide, of cultural amnesia and the loss of inherited values. An important passage defines Jane's consciousness, or rather lack of consciousness, of the past. She has an “instinctive aversion from the past” as an oppressive fiction, a “pompous imposter.” The thought of the “majority of people who are no longer there is inimical to the sense of being” she enjoys. Her revulsion is caused, mainly, by her feeling of the falsehood of what is offered as memory or tradition. The “falsifying piety” or the “bitterness” of the witnesses destroys any claim the past may make to value or objectivity. Instead, it dissolves into a “tedious business of received grievances” and “not to be settled old scores.” This is an individual response, coloured, no doubt, by the acrimonies of Jane's own family life where “too much had been going on for too long.” However, it is clear, Jane is also meant to be typical of her own post-cataclysmic generation. Significantly, she is made to feel that everyone treats the past with a lying reverence or with bitterness “apart from her own contemporaries” (34-5).

The paradox on which A World of Love turns is that only a mind like Jane's can have an authentic reaction to the past, can recover it as a living thing. The fact that the past is no longer a seemingly coherent tradition connected to the present does not mean it cannot speak to individual modern minds. In fact, it may speak more clearly since such minds are not held in a set pattern of responses or attitudes. Jane's feeling that she is free to “raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat” the past in “any possible way” may be the necessary prelude to any real seeing or experiencing of it, any making of it her own (35).

The crucial scene of her finding of Guy's letters in the attic emphasizes the anomalies and oddities of Jane's relationship with the Montfort inheritance. The lumber “stacked up and left to rot” embodies her perception of the past, both historical and familial as “so much ignoring, perhaps infamy.” Time has reduced all its qualities to chaos and made its experiences fragmentary and unmeaning like the juxtaposition of “cobwebby antlers” with the “broken splendid legs of a chair.” The characteristically later Bowen inverted word order (“shocking was it to her”) enhances the reader's sense of Jane's refusal to see any connection between herself and this past in which “everything was derelict, done for, done with” (27).

There is an obvious disparity between Jane's revulsion, consistent with her character as described elsewhere, and the fact that, although oppressed by the lumber in the attic, she feels herself, in some way, summoned to be there. Rose Macaulay refused to classify Jane's experience with “Miss Bowen's earlier experiments with the occult” (132) since A World of Love is not primarily a ghost story and the phantom of Guy never in fact appears. In some ways her caution is justified. “Supernatural” may be a label which excuses the reader any further examination of the uncompromisingly strange event recounted in A World of Love.

Some preliminary points are worth noticing. Jane's “summons” to the attic, the point where “somewhere out behind Montfort” she “imagined she heard a call,” follows immediately upon a short, almost lyrical passage describing her bicycle ride home after leaving the Fête “on an impulse.” The note is one of an abandonment of conscious thought, the soft dust rising wraithlike, the honeysuckle sweetening the deepening hedges, the light refusing to fade, the distances “cool with hay.” Jane's lack of edginess and her elders' obsession with the past creates an ease and freedom which is the precondition of her receptivity. As Jane rides through the evening it is clear that, in some curious way, she is at one with the landscape, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that she does not consciously seek to be so. The air is “tense” with suspended dew; but also, more significantly, Jane is united in mood and feeling with this unexplained, unarticulated, air of expectation. “Her own beautiful restlessness was everywhere” (26-7).

Jane's consciousness is utterly free from the “deep down tightening” of animosity which traps her mother and Antonia in a bond of “bickerings, jibings, needlings, recriminations, sulks, traps set, points scored” (51). Economically, too (and this point is important), Jane has escaped from the financial trap in which her mother and father are caught. Trained at Antonia's expense for secretarial work, she “could be held to be qualified for her first post” (14). Jane, “so removed by her school education,” can make her way in the competitive urban present. A World of Love is careful not to sentimentalize her innocence. There is nothing soft about her. She has Lilia's “coldness” and has been “rendered colder” by Antonia. Her attitude to the quarrels and entanglements of yesteryear is callous and indifferent. She approaches them without involvement and “with the foreignness of this supplanting new time” (51). Growing up amid “extreme situations and frantic statements” (34) she has learned out of her “feeling for equilibrium” how to protect herself by ignoring the atmosphere around her. The text makes it clear that Jane's toughness, her “conquering, violating” quality is what makes her “ready, empty, apt—the inheritor” of what the past can really say to the present and ready to “hear the call” as she rides on her bicycle through the evening (51).

This thorough account of the social, cultural and economic background which enables Jane, specifically, to receive the message takes the whole encounter out of the realm of arbitrary “occult phenomena.” The events which form the core of A World of Love are mysterious. They are, at the same time, grounded in a psychological credibility to which a mass of information has contributed and the emphasis is on the grounding rather than on the mystery. At the heart of the novel there lies, not a frisson, but an affirmation. The past is not “done with or done for” since the very completeness of the cataclysm which divides the contemporary world from it means the possibility for some, at least, of the inhabitants of that world of new, unbiased, exciting, personal connections with it. Jane's experience with Guy's long lost letters is given another context by the existence of her sister Maud's imaginary playmate, “Gay David.” Jane's vivid encounter with a presence from the past is echoed clearly in a comic tone by Maud's violent tussles with her “elemental” or “familiar.” Yet, the comic echo is also a serious comment. It is a reminder to take Jane's encounter with Guy naturally and easily, as something analogous to the fantasy her sister shares with many, perhaps most, children. It would be clumsy and pointless to ask how “real” Gay David is. He has the reality of the imagination used naturally and in a fashion more significant than the reality of everyday events. Jane's perceptions, so strange viewed from one angle, are not an intrusion into the normal order of experience, acceptable only as a fictional device. They are part of that order of experience but a part under-rated, dismissed or not understood.

Jane, then, reacts to the letters not only with a reserve of as yet uncalled on emotion but also with the peculiar attention unstaled by the habit or repetition of a longstanding involvement. The novel stresses that it is “their remoteness from her” which allows her in “honour” to “make free” of the letters to use them, or accommodate them to her emotional needs (33). Above all, A World of Love is “about” the way in which a piece of the past becomes alive for an individual, supplying needs and creating an atmosphere or a way of perceiving that the present does not offer.

The letters are part of the “long settled dust.” Yet, while the rubber band which holds them has rotted, the ink “had not faded” but remains sharp in the candlelight. They are at once ancient and immediate. Jane feels another personality speaking directly to her, all the more because there is no evidence of when or to whom the letters were written. Her experience is more immediate because there is no web of tradition between her and their author. Yet, paradoxically, one of the letters' effects on her is to make her realize that spots in the landscape around Montfort were “pre-inhabited” (48). One, for example, had been the scene of “an ardent hour of summer.” What the author of the letters said he saw “was stamped on the scene again” and those details become “part of the story” for the gazing Jane.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Jane has had to make the discovery of this significance for herself. Antonia reflects that when Jane retires to read the letters she will be in a place soaked with past associations bearing, although the girl “might not know it” (46), tokens of “its infestation by many childhoods.” The individual can recapture this past, or at least such of it as he or she can use, but the knowledge cannot be transferred. It must be won again. However, the central affirmation of A World of Love (and it is a vital one) is that it can be won and can become a living reality.

Jane's contact with the letters does not, of course, remain at the level of a romance “with a dusty trunk” (39), so bewildering to Antonia considering the “chances” the girl has had. In the most important scene of A World of Love, that of Jane's first visit to Lady Latterly's and of Guy's “appearance,” the intimations, dreams, and private emotional discoveries she may have had, or made, as a result of reading the letters, receive an external validation. More important, they, and Guy, acquire the explicit dimensions of a social touchstone, a means by which the present is judged. There is a complex and subtle juxtaposition of elements in this scene—a playing off of nuance against nuance, a constant effect of surprise, contrast and the unexpected which demands that the reader be alert. It is easy to misread this crucial episode.

Among the most important elements is a theatricality which Jane herself recognizes and enjoys. Jane sees in the lavish furnishings an indication of Lady Latterly's lack of originality and her nervous self-consciousness. Most important, perhaps, is the ingenue's interest in worldliness, specifically in the emotional and sexual experience of Lady Latterly's guests.

However, there is one significant factor which modifies the reader's understanding of this whole episode. It is clearly a misreading of Jane's visit to see it as innocence introduced to sophistication and awed, frightened, or endangered by it. Nor is it, in spite of the frequently suggested influence of Henry James on Elizabeth Bowen, a study of the mysterious power of innocence in the manner of What Maisie Knew. There is a real danger of adopting such preconceived formulae precisely because they do seem to fit some of the facts. It is important to be aware that while Jane may be “innocent” and missing some things, there are other, more salient, matters of which she is fully aware. She appreciates, above all, the way in which the scene to which she is introduced reflects and depends on wealth and conspicuous consumption (“Everything cost, nothing was for nothing”). She sees an essential falsity and triviality in the company and in the occasion (“You're nothing … but a pack of cards”). At the same time she grasps her own uneasy position (“The cards were stacked against her”). She knows she was to “pay” for her entertainment by “being the lovely nobody,” by providing her high-strung hostess with a conversation piece for the guests whom, on the whole, Lady Latterly dislikes and mistrusts. She grasps the fact that she will need more than innocence, “radiant foolhardiness,” if she is going to succeed with these people. At the same time, she is amused and “on the whole stimulated” by her awareness of the scene and the role she is asked to play (61). Jane's problem is that, although she can guess at a certain worldly knowledge, at power and influence perhaps, at a range of sexual and emotional knowledge, she does not know what lies behind the “anonymous masks.” She takes the guests to be “men of the world,” but “what world might be left to be of, she did not ask herself” (58-9).

Jane obtains an access to understanding, both emotional and historical, with the “appearance” of Guy in the following scene. It is vital, however, to notice that before Guy can “appear,” he must be validated; his meaning and significance must be confirmed from an external source. Guy cannot remain simply a creature of Jane's fantasies and reveries if his personality is to influence her life, and through her, those of the other inhabitants of Montfort.

Lady Latterly's atypical guest, the Irishman “Old Terence,” the only “native” present apart from Jane herself, is a reluctant witness whose testimony is, therefore, all the more impressive. His false position as a kind of invited performer who remembers the “gay days” before 1914 produces a mixture of “vanity, guilt and sentimentality” in the old man. He is getting “sick to death” of the reminiscences which have been his chief social asset. “Now don't you start having me on too” he protests as Jane asks him about the past. His reaction implies a touch of self-disgust at his role of professional entertainer and nostalgia-monger “worked upon by the aliens.” Deeper than this, however, is the doubt which A World of Love as a whole tries to answer; that the past, in certain historical situations, can have any meaning whatever for the present. After such cultural fracture, outright amnesia might be more dignified than “rotten old romancing and story-telling.” Terence is weary of that falsification of the past Jane has already noticed in her elders' talk (“You make half of it up and who's the wiser?”). The connection was broken “too many years ago” and the living quality of the former experience becomes sentimental fabrication provided for those moneyed intruders who falsely imagine they can “buy the past.” Jane declares that she “does not buy” since she lives at Montfort which, to Terence's evident surprise, “has not gone.” As soon as Terence realizes that Jane is, like himself, “a fish out of water” at Lady Latterly's party, he provides her with the one essential piece of corroborative evidence for all her intimations and guesses. Refusing to be bound by exact dates (“I'm my own calendar”), since such a general awareness cannot be tested historically, he asserts that there has been an unmistakeable change in society:

These days one goes where the money is—with all due respect to this charming lady. Those days we went where the people were.

Terence's tentative and almost grudging statement, given after his deliberate repudiation of nostalgia, is a vital connection, like the missing part of an old fresco, with the emotional world of the past. As if to anticipate and dismiss any reduction comment, this information is followed immediately by an admission that Jane has been drinking a strong cocktail. (“These are powerful, you know, or perhaps you didn't know”). If a drink, as well as the testimony of a surviving witness, changes the play of her fancy to a true vision of the past, why should that disprove what she feels? It is, after all, only, in the phrase of Traherne omitted from the epigraph, “a means of conveyance” by which the “Great Thing” reaches her (62-4).

What follows is an extraordinary shrivelling up of the feeble, inadequate present by contrast with the re-awakened past. When “Guy is among them” there is a “visible recoil” of Lady Latterly and her guests who are like “poor ghosts” after sunrise or cock-crow. She seems to fade visibly as, in a superb phrase, “dissolution flowed through the chiffon” of her dress. A curious, spontaneous set of rituals which follows marks the “odd bridal ascendancy” Jane establishes over the dinner party. Mamie, one of Lady Latterly's guests, playing Ophelia or Lady Macbeth, as the others sardonically comment, drops a rose between the knife and fork of an empty place at the table. This brittle woman's affected gesture becomes part of the awakening of some primaeval dimension of experience as Terence, his “eyes consulting Jane's,” pinches to death a moth which lands on the rose. (It is a suggestion of the sacrifice to the dead which, in Homer and elsewhere, aids their communication with the living.) The writing in this crucial passage measures up to the difficulty of Elizabeth Bowen's enterprise. The strange intimations are presented obliquely and never allowed to become explicit or portentous. Also, the context of the experience is very carefully defined, especially the paradox that it is the very rootlessness of these “displaced rich,” their very lack of imagination, their “barbarian nerves” out of touch with past culture and values, which is the means by which the reality embodied in Guy can assert itself. They are nothing and have nothing which can offer an obstruction to it (65-7).

Most important, however, is the effect of Guy's manifestation. It is to redeem, rather than shame, the present. “Something more peremptory” than the imagination changes the whole tone of the dinner table. (This is an explicit, but characteristically casual, admission that some supernatural event does occur, that “there had been an entrance.”) Guy, or the quality of life he embodies or which his name evokes, is glimpsed in the stray expressions, casual words or gestures of this unlikely group. The present and the past are no longer utterly severed from each other. Rather, the past can be seen or surmised in fragments, isolated traits, turns of phrase, even glances as talk at the table “took a heroic turn—a recollection of action as it could be.” This last phrase makes the essential point. Nostalgia for a vanished world, the rediscovery for oneself of a lost way of feeling or living, even the proof, from external evidence that it had existed are all much less important than the certainty that it “could be” again. With the “appearance” of Guy at Lady Latterly's dinner-party, the elegy and desolation of A World of Love begin to give place to a renewed belief in human potentiality. Guy's letters, like Arthur Hallam's in In Memorian (XCV) became the means by which the continuation of a past life in the present is affirmed (68).

The remainder of A World of Love is concerned with the complex effect of that continued life, the lifting of the curse on Montfort and on its two women, Antonia and Lilia. It is here that the novel's relationship to mythic prototypes is most subtle, oblique, self-conscious and “modern.” In spite of the Waste Land imagery with which A World of Love is coloured, the redemption traced in its later pages is not a simple affair of restoration and recovery. If the “dead god” revives to connect Jane with a lost past, he comes to free Antonia and Lilia from their connections with it, connections of a diseased and damaging kind. Jane bears witness to each woman that Guy has, in some sense, been resurrected.

Antonia seems to shrug off the girl's testimony that “it was Guy who was there tonight”: “He always had a rotten taste in company.” Later, as she sits in the dark on the stairs in the “watching and waiting” attitude of her adolescence, the true effect of Jane's statement emerges. The prose in this passage catches Antonia's nervous strain, her “unspent senses” in an accumulation of jarring, clashing words—“crack,” “shot,” “spurting,” “stuttering”—as the sights and sounds around her are “magnified and distorted.” More important, however, is the division in her perceptions which mirrors the division in herself. At the heart of her tragedy, it is now made clear, was a thwarting of her emotional and sexual development. “In one half of the self” she broods on a memory of her recent bath. There had been no other swimmer, “none in reality.” She had, that is, been accompanied by a fantasy or a memory of Guy, her constant companion on such occasions in her youth. “For the other half of her” there is the sexual fantasy, constantly recurring, never fulfilled, of becoming the lover of Lilia's husband Fred whom she watches with Jane in the hall below. In this sterile division, between desire and the memory which blights its natural growth and development, she has for years been caught (74-6).

Jane's testimony reawakens in Antonia the exact recollection of the nature of her and Guy's relationship. There is an “entering back into possession” (77), as the sense of her and Guy's youth rushes back “from every direction.” It is difficult not to recall, in the description of the kind of love they had, the relationship of Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. There is almost an echo in “endless rushing or rushing endlessness” (78) of the two children, their “unpitying roughness” with each other, the sense of “always,” the conviction of “going on and on,” of timelessness, in a landscape possessed by both. It is unnecessary to become involved in the question, over-discussed, but seemingly insoluble, of whether Emily Bronte intended Cathy's and Heathcliff's love to be “pre-pubertal,” “mystical” or simply a particularly intense sexual and romantic attachment. The point is that Elizabeth Bowen probably echoes it in the description of the young Guy and Antonia because she felt that childhood attachment was something different from sexual love. The evidence for this lies in the incident which immediately follows Antonia's rediscovery of her relationship with Guy. In an unmistakable consequence of that discovery and a part of the chain reaction set off by Jane's testimony, Antonia, finally, brings into the open the possibility of an affair between herself and Fred. He responds by suggesting that they “let sleeping dogs lie” (80). There had once been the possibility of such love between them but Antonia herself “mucked everything up” (82). By falling in love with Guy, she enacted or initiated a “Fall,” a loss of the curious timeless world of permanence and power they had possessed as children. That loss was real enough since, Fred says, “the way you two were, you could have run the world” (82). Worse still, Antonia's obsession with the dead Guy, originating in her confusion of two kinds of love, has destroyed the possibility of a relationship between Fred and herself. He has married Lilia and, in spite of Antonia's scorn, insists that originally he loved his wife and that his marriage, though unhappy, is not meaningless.

The novel is especially interesting here for what it does not say. It makes no glib or trite statement about “maturity.” Yet there are inferences to be drawn about the disastrous nature of Antonia's quest for the wrong kind of love, her long rear-guard battle of possessiveness over Guy, with Lilia as pawn. To understand the past is, for Antonia, the prelude to being free from it. The corollary to her understanding that she and Guy are living in an eternally present “now or nothing” (77) is the need to accept an inevitable transitoriness. She does this, listening to the strokes of passionless “Big Ben” (129) which prelude the radio news bulletin. As she and Jane sit, “bracing the sound,” Antonia hears in it a “spell-breaker” (129), freeing her from the “rubbed weary passions” which had had their say. Significantly too, “it was after Guy had gone that he was most clearly to be seen” (130).

This theme of a paradoxical combination of a recapturing of the past with a liberation from it lies at the centre of A World of Love. It has, and is meant to have, political and social reverberations. Although to paraphrase is to violate, it is suggested that the ideals, codes, atmospheres of worlds which time has “thrown behind” can only have life as they have it for Jane. They offer a means of imaginative and emotional awakening, providing the image of a possibility the present has not shown and a means of judging that present. (The quality of Guy's nature and emotional life, for example, enable Jane to judge the vapid and flashy Peregrine, another of Lady Latterly's guests, who tries to seduce her. She finds his kiss “too empty to resent” (118-119). In this way, the past can renew life for the living and, in a manner, can itself live again. But the former social structure and one's own notion of what the emotional life of the past might have been if it had continued cannot be retained. The effort to do so merely stifles and embitters the present.

Antonia obtains her liberation at a price. She must accept a lost or suppressed fact, “the needle in the haystack,” (135) that like it or not, “Guy did love Lilia.” This was true in spite of the affair in which she and her cousin were involved shortly before his final departure for France. For Lilia, a true vision of the past and freedom from it are easier to find than they are in Antonia's case. Although exploited and probably undervalued, Lilia is not self-deceiving. When Jane asks her about Guy in the hair-dressing salon at Clonmore, Lilia's replies are significant. Through her trite and understated account it is apparent that she was not hopelessly grieving for the lost Guy. She and he had “no destiny” (91) since, although Guy was “in love” with her, their love was brief. The experience was not the definitive one of her life since “more has happened to me than that” (92); specifically, she tells Jane, “your father.” The blight on Lilia's life was not her absorption in the past but the inability of a somewhat dull, spiritless and untalented woman to resist Antonia's myth-making and the emotional and economic force which sustained it. As she tells Antonia, it was not Guy who wasted her life, but Antonia herself (125).

Jane's testimony of Guy's “return” enables her mother to re-live, to understand and to be finished with the humiliation which has coloured her life and, largely, sapped her confidence. After she had seen Guy off for the last time, she overheard him and Antonia, “jibing at one another to the end,” refer to another face he might possibly “see again.” Perhaps he was having yet another affair, possibly with the recipient of the letters Jane finds. Worse than this is the sense of his emotional unity and complicity with his cousin, so much more significant than “this girl you're marrying” in Antonia's dismissive phrase. The wound this inflicts “was not to be thought of, so it never was.” It remains for years, diminishing Lilia's self-respect and weakening her resistance to Antonia: “If not the Beloved, what was Lilia? Nothing” (96).

The scene in the garden (95-98) offers one essential clue to Lilia's recovery. She gains the knowledge of what her and Guy's past had been by an act of courage. She goes to meet it, literally and metaphorically. The image which describes this act recalls the shrivelling away of the briars in Sleeping Beauty, a folk-tale analogue to what is happening here, the restoration of the natural flow of time after its uncanny suspension:

Not an enemy briar dared cross her way now Lilia was not treating but advancing.

(98)

She glimpses herself and Guy when young. “Both were deep in love.” The suspicion she had cherished since their parting had been without foundation. With the revaluation of herself there follows the beginning of a reconciliation with her husband. It might appear that Lilia's escape from her long subjection to the past is handled in a sketchy, even perfunctory, manner. Elizabeth Bowen suggests, however, the arbitrary and unnecessary nature of that subjection. The answer really was simple, to see and love the past for what it had been, to have confidence in what it might have been, and, bidding farewell to it, to take what the present continues to offer.

There is something deliberately self-conscious, even slightly tongue-in-cheek about the “mythic” echoes of the end of the novel. As Jane journeys to Shannon airport, the Waste Land is refreshed. The obelisk drops from view leaving the sky-line “to be one continuous flowing change” (142), reminding us again that the flow of time has been restored. As in Eliot's poem, the rain, so long desired, is first promised (144) and then finally begins to fall. However, Jane is there at Lady Latterly's request to pick up one of the “chatelaine's” young cast-off lovers, Richard Priam, who had decided to appear. Jane and Richard meet and, like Oliver and Celia in As You Like It “they no sooner looked but they loved” (149).

In isolation, this last episode might seem a cynical denial of the novel's supposed theme of rebirth and redemption. It is, rather, the sophisticated combination of the mythic with an ironic probing which checks but does not destroy, a mode which Thomas Mann called “mythos plus psychology” (Von Gromick, 46) and in which the monumental and statuesque outlines of legend are combined with a sharp naturalistic psychological analysis. The result strengthens rather than weakens them. Elizabeth Bowen evokes the beauty and perfect consummation of a mythic prototype while refusing to be bound to anything so formulaic and restrictive. Life may suggest archetypes. It is too complex to be fully explained by them.

A World of Love represents a triumphant answer to the question raised by Jocelyn Brooke about Elizabeth Bowen's direction. Where would she go now that the society she had described and, he might have added, the values she had upheld were no longer tenable? Her best known and her greatest novels, The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day, had essentially been studies of the effects of cultural and spiritual deracination affirming that, in the words of the old housekeeper Matchett in the former novel, “those without memories don't know what is what” (80). Perhaps the process of deracination or social change Brooke referred to had proceeded too far for her to go on making, in however qualified a fashion, a defence of ancient springs. However illegitimate biographical information may be in critical discussion, it is impossible not to notice her own increasing financial difficulties in her attempt to keep her “roots” at Bowen's Court, which ended a few years later when the house was sold. She may have seen more practical problems in her previous insistence on the need to locate oneself physically and economically within a cultural tradition. A World of Love is not a renunciation of this earlier moral framework. Instead, it proposes a subtle modification of it. The past is not abolished or erased. It is re-enacted and its power and beauty fertilize and elevate the present. Yet the re-enactment is also a release allowing time to flow on in its natural progression, since “but for the future we'd have nothing left” (141). Like the traces of Guy's face and the scrambled hints of his conversation one sees and hears in the faces and voices of today, the nobler, heightened “aristocratic” life can never now be more than fragments. However, since it corresponds to something the mind naturally desires and gravitates toward, some “Great Thing” for which it yearns, even the fragments remain potent.

Works Cited

Bowen, Elizabeth. A World of Love. 1955; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983.

———. “Manners.” 1937; rpt. in Collected Impressions. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950.

———. “The Big House.” 1942; rpt. in Collected Impressions. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950.

———. The Death of the Heart. 1938; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962.

Craig, Patricia. Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983.

Macaulay, Rose. “An Irish Summer.” Times Literary Supplement 4 March 1955.

Von Gromick, Andre. “Myth Plus Psychology: A Stylistic Analysis of Death in Venice.” 1956; rpt. in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Henry Hatfield. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964.