[In the following excerpt, O'Faolain asserts that Bowen's writing was influenced by her Anglo-Irish background and its accompanying sense of exile. O'Faolain also considers Bowen's relationship to the French novelist and short story writer Gustave Flaubert and discusses Bowen as a romantic in an anti-romantic age.]

Elizabeth Bowen is detached by birth from that society she describes. She is an Irishwoman, at least one sea apart from English traditions. She descends from that sturdy and creative sub-race we call the Anglo-Irish. At least a part of her literary loyalties are with that long and honourable pedigree that goes back through Shaw, Joyce, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, Yeats, Wilde, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, Swift and Berkeley to the forced marriage of two races, two islands….

The effects of this detachment seem to be mainly two. Malice would naturally be more free, and the play of sentiment more indulgent. It is a nice ambivalence. No English writer can have quite the same liberty….

Miss Bowen is indebted to another influence besides her race and her exile to stiffen her own natural, shrewd intelligence, her own natural integrity as an observer. This is the early influence of Flaubert. And when we recall the romantic-realist conflict within Flaubert we may see another reason for thinking of Elizabeth Bowen as a bifrontine writer. The conflict in her work is, in fact, not dissimilar. She wavers between two methods of approach.

The essence of her way of seeing life is that, like the singer who was supposed to be able to break a champagne glass by singing at it, she exposes the brittleness of romance by soliciting it ruthlessly. Time, for her characters, is very far removed from Faulkner's continuum, or Hemingway's feeling for events enclosed-at-both-ends. It is a brittle moment, snatched from fate. Happiness in her novels is rapt away, shoplifted, and always dearly paid for. God is the shop-walker who makes her characters pay, and we vulgar citizens, the run-of-the-mill of ordinary people, decent fathers of families, impatient of all youthful aberrations cannot deny His justice.

Happiness may even have to be snatched between the moments. She pursues these golden if elusive hours on behalf of her heroines. So, in The Last September Francie Montmorency found that during her honeymoon time had been "loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness glittered between the moments". In To the North when Cecilia returns to her flat and looks about her at the unfamiliar-familiar … "Life here, still not quite her own, kept for those few moments unknown tranquillity." Happiness is thus interleaved in the book of life. It is a bonus, a wad of dollars smuggled through the customs of life. But to go after this happiness too hard is, one is led to feel, to wrench from life something that it can only give arbitrarily like a Fairy Godmother. One is not therefore surprised to discover that there is nothing of the Hemingwayan will in her characters. They may seem wilful; they are, in practice, the passive recipients of fate. All they receive from fate is passion, and this receipt is like a soldier's calling-to-the-colours. Her characters are conscripted by passion into action. Once in action they fight well, but what Arnold said of the Celt may be said of them: they go into battle and they always fall. It is true that they may also and for long have desired passion, but the desire is never so powerful as the impulse of chance. Her characters are all played upon.

There is a short story in her second book, Ann Lee's, written before she had published her first novel, which neatly illustrates this fateful element in all her later work. It is called "The Parrot". A young girl, Eleanor Fitch, is a companion to an old lady, Mrs Willesden, in whose life nothing ever happens. One morning Eleanor accidentally lets her old lady's parrot fly away. She pursues the gaudy bird in its wayward flight from garden to garden until it pauses in the garden of a Mr Lennicott, a novelist of doubtful repute according to Mrs Willesden. Palpitating, Eleanor enters the garden of this fabulous person, enters his house, meets him in his dressing-gown, has the great adventure of capturing the multi-coloured bird with his assistance. When Lennicott kindly wishes to detain her, offering her fruit, she refuses. "Nobody had ever reached out for her like that so eagerly; she did not want to go back to that house of shut-out sunshine and great furniture where the parrot was royally carried from room to room on trays, and where she was nothing." Eleanor goes back unscathed to her dull routine, thinking: "How world overlapped with world; visible each from the other, yet never to be one."

Now, I have a profound suspicion of that technique of criticism which elucidates the interior meaning of stories, and the secret meanings of an author's mind, by his unconscious use of symbols, but whether this brilliant and far-faring bird luring a potential Proserpine from garden to garden to the haunts of Pluto is or is not—and I think it is—in the full tradition of Flaubertian symbolism (the blueness of Emma Bovary's dream-curtains suggesting the Virgin; and such-like symbols) one may fairly use this fable as a symbol of one of Miss Bowen's favoured types: the dreaming but recusant girl. Longing but vigilant, troubled by her own eagerness, she will, one fine day, follow the bright bird of her dreams into the woods of life and suffer the fate of Proserpine, or worse. There is an atmosphere of ancient fable behind all of Miss Bowen's fiction. Her persons are recognisable temperaments rather than composed characters. Flaubert merely overlays the fabulous. Her characters are the modern, sophisticated, naturalistic novelist's versions of primitive urges. One feels that if she had lived three hundred and fifty years ago when passions rode freely and fiercely she would have described the dreams that drove Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona to love and to death….

Elizabeth Bowen is a romantic up against the despotism of reality. So many other Irish writers are. The metallic brilliance, even the occasional jarring brassiness and jauntiness of her style is, in an admirable sense, a fake, a deceptive cocoon wrapped about the central precious, tender thing. One could imagine a hare settling into her form, a sticky little leveret between her paws, or perhaps a lioness growling over her young. It is the growl of Ich grolle nicht, the Flaubertian coldness imposed on Irish feeling, and the theme is so heartbreaking that it would be embarrassing if she were not tight-lipped about those heroines who just do not know what o'clock it is once love enters their unwary lives. She writes of romantic heroines in an age that has made the two words pejorative. The underlying assumptions here are very much of the Twenties. The conflicts are no longer clear enough to justify bold affirmations, positive statements of loyalty, straight fights or declared aims or ends. Miss Bowen's heroines are, after all, always defeated. In Mauriac's phrase their beauty is borrowed from despair. Not, as we have seen, that she is anti-heroic, but that she must state coldly that heroism, the absolute aim, does not stand a chance in modern society, even while she still insists passionately that it is always worth while to try. She has not assumed that we must therefore reject tradition, but she is plainly unenthusiastic about it. She does not assume that violence is the only possible alternative in fiction to thought. She does not assume that the intellect must be abdicated by the modern novelist. She hovers patiently over her subjects. But the prime technical characteristic of her work, as of other modern women writers, such as Virginia Woolf, is that she fills the vacuum which the general disintegration of belief has created in life by the pursuit of sensibility. It is a highly sophisticated pursuit. Sometimes it is over-conscious and overdone.

Her sensibility can be witty; it can also be catty, even brassy, too smart like an over-clever décor for a ballet. I do not mind that it is, to my taste, on occasion vulgar, though not quite in the sense in which her young girls are vulgar. She has defended, or at least pleaded, for sympathy with vulgarity, and are there not times when good taste is itself a little vulgar? One thinks of the ghastly good taste of Mr Charles Morgan. But what one means by finding this kind of good taste rather vulgar is that it is bloodless, and that one longs occasionally for a good, warm, passionate howl like an Italian mother baying over her dead child. This sort of earthiness is outside the range of any English-trained writer. When Elizabeth Bowen is dealing with elemental things she skirts around them with too much elegance. There are certain things she will not deign to describe. The actual falling in love of her people is one….

The one place where she is really earthy is when she is being humorous, and would, many times over, that she were humorous more often, for when she is being humorous she is also most human. Louie in The Heat of the Day is not only good fun but real; down to earth; far more so than Robert, Harrison and Stella pirouetting about each other exhaustingly. Yet, to take a fair measure of the humanity (as against the elegance) of her sensibilities, one may compare them with the sensibilities of Virginia Woolf whose antennae are as sensitive as remote radar, but who reacts not so much to human beings as to things and "states of mind". Miss Bowen is also responsive to things and states of mind, but she responds chiefly, and warmly, to her own favoured types of people. "Things," Mrs Woolf characteristically makes Terence Hewitt say in The Voyage Out, "things I feel come to me like lights. I want to combine them. Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? I want to make figures." That also, to my taste, is a form of vulgarity through elegance. Miss Bowen would never be quite so refined. She wants to make people not figures, to put them into conflict with society, and her explorations of their feelings are never just an exploitation of her own.

Her outer-imposed limitations do, nevertheless, obtrude themselves. The Death of the Heart was, indeed, a firm and passionately felt protest against the modern desiccation of feeling, but one could not help noting that it offered no moral approach to the problem: meaning that it intimated no norm to set against the subnormal. But can one reasonably blame Miss Bowen for this? We are brought back by this longing for a norm to the death of the traditional Hero, that symbol of the norm in all traditional literature. She, too, can only present us with the martyr in place of the Hero, the representative not of the norm but of the disease. Greene's alternative is God. Miss Bowen is too deeply rooted in the great, central humanist tradition of European culture to take refuge in hereafters. What she directs our eyes towards is the malady of our times that breaks the dreaming and gallant few. It is what her master Flaubert did with Emma Bovary, more ruthlessly. She has described the dilemma of our times honestly, beautifully and at times movingly. To have done so much, and done it so well, is to have done a great deal….