[Elizabeth Bowen] wrote with originality, bounty, vigor, style, beauty up to the last….

["The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen"] makes several new pleasures possible…. To see anew these bright stars set among their own constellations, to read again "Mysterious Kôr" in company with "Summer Night," "The Happy Autumn Fields," "Ivy Gripped the Steps" and "The Demon Lover" is to experience in its full force that concentration of imaginative power which was hers.

We can gain, too, a truer perception of its nature. Her work was in very close affinity with its time and place, as we know….

In "Her Table Spread," we're at a dinner party in a remote Irish castle overlooking an estuary on a rainy night; in the estuary is the rare sight of a visiting English destroyer…. A whole welcoming world is being made out of that wet, lonely, amorous Irish night.

They are all asleep at the end, even the bat in the boathouse; while the rain goes on falling on the castle, and below in the estuary the destroyer, still keeping to itself, is steaming its way slowly out to sea.

As it ends the story can be seen to be perfect, and the perfection lies in the telling—the delicacy, the humor, above all the understanding that has enveloped but never intruded upon it, never once pricked the lovely, free-floating balloon.

Elizabeth Bowen's awareness of place, of where she was, seemed to approach the seismetic; it was equaled only by her close touch with the passage, the pulse, of time…. There was a clock in every story and novel she ever wrote; those not in running order were there to give cause for alarm. Time and place were what she found here. Her characters she invented, in consequence….

Elizabeth Bowen … was—and was from the start—a highly conscious artist. Being alive as she was in a world of change affected her passionately. The nature and workings of human emotions magnetized her imagination; with all her artist mind she set forth to comprehend, and thus capture, human motives—men's, women's and children's. Time and place that she was so aware of, sensitive to, conveyed to her: situation. Human consciousness meant urgency: drama. Her art was turned full range upon a subject: human relationships….

The imaginative power to envision a scene—acute perception, instinctive psychological insight, in an intensified form—was her gift. It became the greatest gift of an artist who was profoundly happy to give the rest of her life to fathoming it.

The passage of time has deactivated "The Needlecase." There are no longer "fallen women," so designated, whose doom it was to earn their living by sewing dresses for other women in other women's houses, poor souls, taking their meals upstairs from a tray. The story dates, and is only mentioned because it constitutes the exception…. The others don't date and will not; their subjects are major.

"The Disinherited" is one of a number of Bowen stories of the dislocations arising from social and psychological disturbance. (p. 3)

This story of a long and misspent evening, in which everything is at cross purposes, miscarries, is misdirected, and every intention seems as lost to the world and as in the way as old Mrs. Bennington, is a turning kaleidoscope of shifting, fragmented lives. The startling moment when Prothero, the chauffeur, comes into view seated before the table in his quarters and writing a letter gives us the interlocking piece. Nothing so far has come up in the story as true, as straightforward and brutally lined out, as plain and simple and never to be changed or subject to change, as Prothero's letter addressed to a woman named Anita, which is the full account of how and why he murdered her. At the end of his long day he writes the letter and then burns it in the stove; he writes it every night and burns it….

Prothero's letter is an example of the extraordinary tour de force of which Elizabeth Bowen was capable. Her imaginative power to envision a scene is almost hallucinatory here; it makes one feel that she might have put herself within the spell of its compulsion….

Her sensuous wisdom was sure and firm; she knew to its last reverberation what she saw, heard, touched, knew what the world wore in its flesh and the clothing it would put on, how near the world came, how close it stood: in every dramatic scene it is beside us at every moment. We see again how pervasive this knowledge was through her stories.

And firmly at home in the world, Elizabeth Bowen was the better prepared to appreciate that it had an edge. For her, terra firma implies the edge of a cliff; suspense arises from the borderlines of experience and can be traced along that nerve. Her supernatural stories gave her further ways to explore experience to its excruciating limits, through daydream, fantasy, hallucination, obsession—and enabled her to write as she did about World War II.

In the unsurpassable "Mysterious Kôr," her most extraordinary story of those she wrote out of her life in wartime London, the exalted, white, silent, deserted other city of Kôr occupies the same territory as bombed-out London through the agency of the full moon at its extreme intensity….

Of all the stories, it is "Summer Night" that I return to….

This unforgettable story, the most remarkable of a group of longer ones, is an example of the sheer force of the Bowen imagination. What other writer could have propelled the whole of "Summer Night" from its rushing headlong start to its softly subsiding conclusion, like a parachute let down to earth gently folding in its petals? The turmoil of all these passionate drives, private energies that in their own directions touch yet never can merge or become one together, is yet all magical; their passions become part of the night sky and part of the world in wartime….

That the collection richly reconfirms the extraordinary contribution Elizabeth Bowen has made to English letters alleviates the pain one feels at their neglect since her death. Their vitality is their triumph…. "A Day in the Dark," her last story, is the last one in the book. It is a growing girl's story of the accidental way in which one learns the name of the deepening feeling that one has come to live with…. Like many another of these stories, it is its own kind of masterpiece. (p. 22)