In her fiction, Miss Bowen is first of all an impressionistic writer. Since there are degress of impressionism, she might best be considered a concrete impressionist. Highly selective, she writes a taut, concentrated style which produces clear, well-defined vividness, in opposition to a vague impressionism verging on the dreamlike. Scenes and characters are rendered in few but telling strokes; here, as with other aspects of her work, Miss Bowen's ideal reader is invited to exercise his own imagination and intelligence. She approaches her material not as a camera but as an X-ray, and she produces a print of essences from which the reader must create a realistic image. (p. 23)

Miss Bowen's prose is polished and crafted with the care of poetry. But on occasion, however, cutting across the normally elegant surface, like a variation in poetic meter, are deliberate awkwardnesses compounded of syntactical circumlocutions…. Her prose constantly seeks to reflect … [the] pressure of straining suppressed tensions, desires, and emotions. Much is implied, even if little sometimes is seemingly said. The prose style also relates to the omniscient narrator who writes the fiction. The persona's vision is classical: rational, intelligent, aloof, penetrating, discriminating, and witty; its attitude is humane and benevolent; but it is unsentimental. Its whole approach to life is firm, frank, and wise—what is meant by "mature" at its optimum. Strategically, the mask is most cunningly devised to make effective Miss Bowen's subject—feelings. (p. 24)

A very considerable portion of any Bowen novel is dialogue; and it is presented much of the time with only modest intrusions by the narrative voice that allows the reader to gather implication and ramifications. Obviously a measure of obliqueness results, and on this count the author has been accused of obscurantism. Without denying that there are moments when she appears overly elliptical, her technique can be defended. Most directly, her obliqueness serves to make the reader conscious of the difficulties of identifying and assessing the undercurrents of meaning and feeling upon which conversation moves; technique thus functions as a correlative. Furthermore, ellipses are a rich source of suspense and possibility…. Finally, the dialogue, which further involves the willing reader in the creative process, enriches and intensifies the whole texture of her work…. (pp. 24-5)

[Two] other characteristics are pervasive: a strong sense of place and the play of wit, which evoke a distinct atmosphere. (p. 25)

Miss Bowen's most dramatic rendering of the dangers of preserved innocence is in To the North. In no other novel is she so close to the world of fairy tale…. (p. 41)

Emmeline [the heroine of To the North] is at last to be identified as a narcissist. The repeated emphasis upon her beauty, her passivity, and her [poor] eyesight provides the clues to her trouble. Nothing has disturbed her peace; her beauty has been both protective cocoon and sufficient reason for gentle treatment by the passing world. Miss Bowen tells nothing of Emmeline's past because there is nothing to record; she has not had the gradual training which prepares individuals for life's rude and inevitable shocks. Markie [Emmeline's lover], on the other hand—and—this is one of the book's master touches of irony—does progress to awareness and to a greater sense of responsibility toward others. He is capable at the last of self-judgment, of "self-contempt, and a maddening resentment of his desire …"…. Markie, whatever distortions he has harbored, can be seen to have always had the heat of life within. Increasingly terrified by her speed and trancelike driving, Markie speaks her name "hopelessly"; and, "as though hearing her name on his lips for the first time, dazzled, she turned to smile"…. She, it appears, has already found herself in the promised land and she is joyous to discover Markie's presence. In the instant of distraction, the car plunges head-on into another, killing everyone. The rendering of this last ride together is one of the finest passages in all of Miss Bowen's work. (pp. 45-6)

[The Little Girls] is symbolic; but it differs in the degree of ambivalence attached to its symbols. Consequently, this novel is Miss Bowen's most challenging book; this fact is all the more surprising in the light of its taut and racy style. We might conceivably be reminded of Wallace Stevens's poetry with its pure, crystalline exterior and its metaphysical interior. In this novel, the author presents what must constitute the ultimate variation upon her innocent heroine character by creating one who is sixty-one years old. (p. 68)

The Little Girls is Miss Bowen's most intricate and subtle novel: intricate in the relationship of its components and subtle in its psychology. Allusiveness is carried to a tantalizing edge where one more step would plunge everything into an incomprehensible state. Yet the surface almost belies this allusiveness; the author has never sustained sprightlier pacing or more rapid dialogue….

[Dinah (Dicey) Delacroix] decides to contact the two women [Clare (Mumbo) and Sheila (Sheikie)] with whom she was most intimate when they were all eleven…. (p. 82)

[After their reunion] Dinah talks her reluctant partners into digging up the coffer [they buried as children]….

Seeming concern for the retrieval of both chest and friendship is displaced by the psychological mystery of Dinah's behavior and, retroactively, by the motivation underlying the apparent spontaneity of her decision to contact the past. The shift is, of course, seeming rather than real. Basically, the book is constructed on a cunning switch. Of the three women, Dinah appears to be the only one living a satisfying life…. Yet events lead to a reversal in which Dinah emerges as the most troubled of the trio….

[In] summoning her old friends, [Dinah] has encountered fears and doubts about the reality of her existence and the quality of its feeling. (p. 83)

Dinah's [emotional] illness proves double-edged. For her, it serves as purgative; for her circle of acquaintances, it serves as rejuvenation. (p. 85)

[The] book ends with Dinah waking from a long sleep. The brief exchange between herself and Clare reveals, for all its terseness, that Dinah has shed her childlike attitude to life along with her terrifying sense of meaninglessness, and assumed her proper role in the present. Upon awakening, Dinah queries: "Who's there?" "Mumbo." "Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?"… It is a paradox worthy of life that the innocence which came to trouble Dinah is the kind which made possible not only her own salvation but also the resurrection of her closest friends. This paradox recurs consistently in the Bowen novels.

When we at last learn what items the girls placed in the coffer, it can be seen that each buried something really requisite to her life. If not in actuality, then metaphysically, events allow the women to repossess what was secretly hidden. Dinah's contribution was a gun, symbol of violence, without which, according to other Bowen novels, life is incomplete. (p. 86)

Clare buried a copy of Shelley's poetry, believing herself through with it. Her failed marriage and her protective brittleness readily enough indicate her loss of a sense of poetry in life and her indifference to the humanitarianism Shelley advocated. Not so readily translatable as the gun and the book is the sixth toe which Sheila contributed to the casket. But, when she mentions how embarrassed she was over the toe, it may be surmised that, in being unwilling to accept her fate or situation, her unwillingness to acknowledge the sliver of flesh has remained as her inability to accept the events of her life, one which accounts for her tensions and hypersensitivity. (pp. 86-7)

As might properly be expected, almost everything that has been said about the author's interests and techniques in her novels applies equally to her stories. A few generalizations are worth repeating, and there is one noteworthy difference. By and large, the protagonists are sensitive, educated, well-mannered females moving through a reasonably well-to-do-world. The point of view is almost always omniscient, and most stories include generous portions of dialogue. All but a few contain incisive but impressionistic descriptive passages which help to establish and sustain mood and tone. Many of the stories show a greater freedom in their handling of time than the novels. The interplay between present and past time (not readily conveyed by analyses), along with elliptical conversation and terse narrative details, contributes to a "difficult" and challenging style. (p. 94)

[Miss Bowen's harshest stories] constitute a vision of the wasteland while cataloguing various causes of entrapment. Sometimes the will of a strong but misdirected person imposes itself upon an innocent or helpless victim ("The Little Girl's Room"); often a character's own desires or ego twist life ("A Love Story"); at other times a person crumbles before forces he can hardly or only vaguely define ("The Disinherited"). Some characters are not even conscious of their entrapment; but, when they are, enlightenment has come only after the process is complete.

Compared with other stories, these generally originate in relatively normal circumstances, a fact which contributes to their chilling effect since we are reminded of the proximity of limbo. The chill is also reinforced by Miss Bowen's detached, stoical humor. Though the situations portrayed are pathetic and painful, our response is to circumstances rather than character; it is cerebral rather than visceral. These stories are essentially static and disclose their portraits of entrapment scenically rather than narratively. (pp. 95-6)

"The Disinherited" is both one of Miss Bowen's longest stories and one of her most detailed depictions of corruption. At the center of the narrative is Davina Archworth, twenty-nine, who is "idle with a melancholy and hollow idleness…." Without money or life of her own, she has come to live off an elderly aunt whose house sits on a rise overlooking a university town. This situation brings Davina into contact with two others, Prothero, Mrs. Archworth's chauffeur, and Marianne Harvey, a quiet "modern" wife who lives in one of many new homes being built on an estate about the town.

Underlying the story is the theme of mutability. The season is autumn, appropriate to the images of decay which abound; the atmosphere is decadent…. Times are changing, and Davina finds herself neither a member in good standing of the old order nor a candidate for the new. One of the disinherited, she is like the grass on the new homes estate: "wiry grass that had lost its nature, being no longer meadow and not yet lawn."

Davina sees herself as an aristocrat without the means. She believes it is money she wants, though it is more likely power. (pp. 102-03)

It is money which brings her into close contact with Prothero. Offering kisses in return, she borrows from him. He too is corrupt, and almost instinctively she recognizes him as a criminal….

The borrowing of money from Prothero and the kisses are simply a measure of Davina's decay. (p. 103)

The story's major dramatic scene is the party to which Davina takes Marianne while her husband is in London…. The party is composed of a motley crew, Davina's crowd, of men and women who are also caught between desire and impossibility of fulfillment. Principal among them is Oliver, the man with whom Davina was once in love and who is to seduce Marianne before the party's end. (p. 104)

In a nice touch, the story gives the scene the following day in which Marianne meets her husband at the station and returns home with him. The occasion is typical of Miss Bowen in its elliptical, tense, and deliciously suggestive nature. Having settled into the living room, Matthew says, "'I think … I must get my glasses changed!' 'Changed?' said Marianne, starting." What we are left speculating about is the impact of the previous night upon Marianne's future. She is conscious of change, and Matthew detects something…. Mutability, then, both physical and metaphysical, is the way of life. Among Miss Bowen's shorter fiction, "The Disinherited" is one of her most telling portrayals of the pain change can inflict—and of the human incapacity for adapting to it….

[Another type of story that Miss Bowen writes centers about] an individual whose attitudes to or whose views about life are called into question. The action revolves around an "opportunity" presented to him for self-discovery or self-judgment…. One of Miss Bowen's best stories, the frequently anthologized "The Queen Heart," displays a most astute switch and gains force by confronting the reader with a complex problem of judgment; the character under attack is wonderfully appealing, and the individuals surrounding her are otherwise. (p. 105)

Few short-story themes have proven more fruitful for Miss Bowen than that of dislocation. Sensitive people, she observes, do not suffer the disintegration of their world lightly; they frequently react, seemingly involuntarily, in strange and unexpected ways when it is threatened…. The stories written in wartime London and published as The Demon Lover have dislocation as their major concern. (p. 113)

Allan E. Austin, in his Elizabeth Bowen (copyright © 1971 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, a Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1971, 134 p.