[There] is a discomforting tone to the first paragraph of [To the North], strongly suggesting that the material world in which it has its being is to be undermined. The knowing information about the Anglo-Italian express [traveling north] sounds a little ominous. (p. 130)

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…. 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 [Cecilia], Emmeline is not quite of this world. She is ethereal, angelic, 'pale and clear'…. She is repeatedly described as short-sighted and thus disconnected from her surroundings…. Before she meets Markie, she is the unawakened ice maiden, the unfallen angel: 'nothing could be as dear as the circle of reading light round her solitary pillow.'

On the other hand, Markie, as Cecilia perceives at their first meeting, is Satanic. (She notices at once that he has the 'quicklidded 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 a very good lawyer) and he masters the threatening implications of love and passion by reducing them to sensual needs…. [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…. [There is an] 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. Markie's nervousness and Emmeline's exhilaration … on their plane flight to Paris anticipate his sexual sensations 'of having been overshot, of having, in some final soaring flight of her exaltation, been outdistanced'. Emmeline makes a joke about the violent pace of Paris taxis being like 'the Last Ride Together'. Such elements project the idyllic section of the novel towards the powerful, catastrophic ending. Emmeline, wearing the original silver dress, drives Markie northwards, back into the element which he has defiled, in order to take revenge. This scheme is not recognized by the heroine: she acts involuntarily. Those fey looks culminate in a final distractedness; while Markie struggles to bring her back to earth, she is given up to speed. The associations that have been made between her work (over which she has lost control), her passion and her unearthly innocence fall into place. (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 … undermines the characters' opportunities for free choice, in the same way as the relentless patterning of the images which dominate them. Even when the emphasis is on the comic world … the freedom of the will seems no more than a toy…. (p. 134)

It is … the treatment of place which provides the most versatile, complex vehicle for the novel's deeper meanings…. [There is] 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…. Set against [this] are places offering peace and stability. But all are potentially lost paradises; a careful colouring of anticipated nostalgia fills the descriptions. (pp. 136-38)