The opening of To the North is deceptive: leaving Italy is not, in itself, to be of importance. Cecilia Summers, the 'young widow' waiting for the train, is not to be the heroine. Its tone is significantly odd and ambiguous. The satirical treatment of a carefully demarcated social world is apparently anticipated, and this is borne out by the ensuing emphasis on manner and properties…. Affluent people lunch, dine, and go to parties; we are often told what they are wearing. The fashions are exactly registered…. (pp. 129-30)

Nevertheless, there is a discomforting tone to the first paragraph of the novel, strongly suggesting that the material world in which it has its being is to be undermined. The knowing information about the Anglo-Italian express sounds a little ominous. The season, like the travellers, is 'uncertain'. Suspended between anticipation and loss, they lunch 'uneasily', awaiting their journey to the north. They are not moving yet, but the … violent, repetitive images precipitate them towards movement, and, even, with 'brass-barred' and 'girdle', towards an idea of imprisonment. That they sit 'facing the clock' hints most forcibly of all at the idea of a train journey as a journey out of life, into the after-world…. There is no doubt (we are told that 'neither had nice characters') that Cecilia and Markie are a punishment to one another for being what they are. The image of a journey in hell is not insistent, but the language keeps edging into unaccountable ferocity…. The climactic last page of the novel, Emmeline's desperate drive with Markie (whom she loves and who has betrayed her) 'to the north' and to their deaths, is prefigured in the oddly sinister tone, the incipient violence of the first chapter.

[Violent deaths] are symptoms of betrayal in Elizabeth Bowen's work, and mark the passing of innocence, whether personal or national. In order that their moral significance should not be blurred by the dramatic shock of feeling the deaths evoke, Elizabeth Bowen establishes from the start a pattern of images which will necessitate them. That the pure-hearted Emmeline should be driven to what is, in effect, murder and suicide, is a badge of her innocence. But the ending of this novel is not therefore grotesquely sensational, as Elizabeth Bowen sometimes chooses to be in horror stories like 'The Cat Jumps'. Rather it has an air of classical formality: the motifs are seen to accumulate and finally cohere in a formulation which is at once simple and extreme.

Unlike her sister-in-law, Emmeline is not quite of this world. She is ethereal, angelic, 'pale and clear', 'more than half transparent materially'. (pp. 130-31)

On the other hand, Markie, as Cecilia perceives at their first meeting, is Satanic. (She notices at once that he has the 'quick-lidded eyes of an agreeable reptile'.) He is the familiar modern anti-hero who has lost touch with the sources of faith and idealism. Reason is his God…. He is an 'uneasy moralist', who, for hedonistic ends, has repressed his sensibilities. Elizabeth Bowen's moral hostility to this character is as pronounced as Henry James's for Gilbert Osmond or D. H. Lawrence's for Gerald Crich, with whom Markie has similarities…. But while her repugnance for Markie is evident, Elizabeth Bowen shares the ability of those greater writers to persuade the reader of what it feels like to be a damned soul…. The sense of strain [felt at times in the novel]—too much ice, too many mannered pairings [of images] …—is caused by the effort to impose the images necessary to the novel's formal organization on Emmeline's train of thought. This is a risk inherent in the plan to load Emmeline and Markie's relationship with elemental imagery and ominous images of travel. But at the two points of greatest intensity in the affair, the week-end of Emmeline's seduction in Paris, and their final car-drive together, the patterning of images contributes to a satisfying aesthetic logic. (pp. 131-33)

Emmeline and Markie, though inside a partly comic novel, are thus implacably directed by the author to their end as tragic protagonists. The strict formality of the plot—two women, two lovers, Henry's death before the start and Emmeline's and Markie's in conclusion, a journey to begin with and a journey to end with—undermines the characters' opportunities for free choice, in the same way as the relent less patterning of the images which dominate them. Even when the emphasis is on the comic world (traditionally one of choice and self-improvement, as in Jane Austen and Forster) the freedom of the will seems no more than a toy…. (p. 134)

[Markie's fear of Emmeline's innocence and idealism] leads into a histrionic, grotesque passage on Tragedy which removes the novel to its furthest point from realism and formalizes the characters into aspects of a genre:

Here figures cast unknown shadows; passion knows no crime, only its own movement; steel and the cord go with the kiss. Innocence walks with violence; violence is innocent, cold as fate; between the mistress's kiss and the blade's is a hair's-breadth only, and no disparity; every door leads to death…. The curtain comes down, the book closes—but who is to say that this is not so?

                                            (p. 135)

The high ritual tone is not a success. It sounds like an affected pastiche of the elements of Jacobean tragedy. But the passage, unusually choric, is evidently intended as a major statement of the novel's ontology. When an implacable idea of necessity is combined with a romantic belief in the personal existence of goodness and innocence, extreme characters must answer to extreme destinies.

The combination is bound to create a problem of realism. Sometimes the tragic formality to which the story aspires is laid bare, as in the passage just quoted; sometimes, as in the opening paragraph, realism is used as a cloak. In other ways too, Elizabeth Bowen has surprisingly little difficulty in making an extreme relationship work at the level of the possible…. The transcendental qualities which we have to allow Emmeline are … offset by her relationship to characters who exist on a more moderate plane.

It is, however, the treatment of place which provides the most versatile, complex vehicle for the novel's deeper meanings. This is not to imply a 'staticness' (which is, as Elizabeth Bowen calls it, a 'dead weight' if scene setting is undramatic). When she says that 'Nothing can happen nowhere', she points to her interest in places which do not readily qualify as 'somewhere'. Boarding houses, shut-up homes, empty villas, obscure shops one can never find again, parks at dusk—places where people have stopped living or are on their way to somewhere else—such settings (particularly in the short stories) are always at the heart of what is odd or ominous in 'the Bowen terrain'. They attract people who have lost their homes or their way…. They are places for 'the disinherited', like the all-night road house in the story of that name…. Similar venues occur in To the North, from the station at Milan to the 'jaded glare of an all night café', glimpsed by Markie on the final journey. Travel, which provides the raison d'être for such settings, has a moral as well as a symbolic significance, caricatured in a comic platitude by Lady Waters: 'This age … is far more than restless; it is decentralized'. Markie's sinister flat, cut off at the top of his sister's 'very high, dark-red house in Lower Sloane Street' with its shadowy corners and its invisible cook whose 'reedy, ghostly whistle' makes Emmeline jump, is the major example of such impermanent 'nowhere' places, symptoms of deracination. Set against them are places offering peace and stability. But all are potentially lost paradises; a careful colouring of anticipated nostalgia fills the descriptions. (pp. 135-38)

Emmeline's betrayal is … intended not simply as a melodramatic romance or as the working-out of a theory of extremes (the angelic and the daemonic) confronting each other, but as a symptom of a more general, historical state of loss and dereliction. The emphasis on material things, as well as being necessary for the novel's social, comic vein, justifies itself morally by being emblematic. Sheltered, gracious living in a place with its own past is considered not only as a good thing in itself but also as a symbol of innocence. This implies, naturally enough, an opposition between rural and urban values which, while it casts a cold eye on modern life, is compatible with the tradition of Jane Austen and Forster. Oudenarde Road is as much of a secret grove as one can find in London; its peace is destroyed by Markie, an essentially cosmopolitan villain.

To strengthen the novel's broader meanings, landscapes of dereliction, which are not required as locales for the action, are imported as illustrations of or metaphors for states of mind. Certainly the consistently suggestive use of place gives these passages homogeneity with the rest of the novel, but they are intended to strike a strange note, and indeed stand out like miniature short stories—the more so since they anticipate so many of the settings, the sinister, autumnal, suburban villas, found in The Cat Jumps (1934) or Look at all Those Roses (1941). (p. 139)

The emotional deprivations from which Elizabeth Bowen's characters suffer (either as a temperamental disability or in response to blows of fate) are so consistently formalized as localities that an eerie overlap between interior and exterior landscapes results. A set piece of description [in To the North], looked at again, is revealed as a Homeric metaphor for the state of a soul:

When a great house has been destroyed by fire … the master has not, perhaps, the heart or the money to rebuild. Trees that were its companions are cut down and the estate sold up to the speculator. Villas spring up in red rows, each a home for someone…. Life here is liveable, kindly and sometimes gay; there is not a ghost of space or silence; the great house with its dominance and its radiation of avenues is forgotten. When spring is sweet in the air … something touches the heart, someone, disturbed, pauses, hand on a villa gate. But not to ask: What was here?

With the quick fancy, the nerves and senses Cecilia could almost love…. With her, the gay little streets flourished, but, brave when her house fell, she could not regain some entirety of spirit. Disability seems a hard reward for courage….

Such an ornate analogy turns the dramatic, personal material of the story into a casebook on the effects of loss. The author's romantic language cloaks her disenchanted vision. (Sean O'Faolain rightly calls the novels 'exquisitely composed logs of disaster'.) The ruined lives with which we are invited to sympathize are reduced to symptoms of an 'uneasy century'—so that there is a tension between the violent, passionate elements in their experience and the clinical use to which they are put by the author. The effect is not a cosy or an endearing one…. But it shows that it is not enough to treat Elizabeth Bowen as merely a writer of sentimental romances…. The losses she chronicles are more than personal. (pp. 140-42)