[Reading The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen] we are aware of steady progress, of increasing mastery of the form….

Her earliest stories (Encounters, 1923, and Ann Lee's, 1926,) were exercises in observation, rounded out by guesswork; she noted mannerisms and imagined their sources or followed up their implications. Her characters are meek, pompous, put-upon, confused, or contrite. She evokes gaiety only to undercut it with an ironic repudiation of its shallowness. Mockery, "the small smile of one who, herself, knows better," is never too far away. She is hardest on the arch, the effusive, and those who would attribute to themselves a "fearful" sensitivity; and this denotes an essential soundness of outlook, which made a firm base for the experiments in intricacy she carried out later. Emotional indecorum always affronted her.

Her own terse judgement of Encounters and Ann Lee's—"a blend of precosity and naïveté"—will not, I think, be disagreed with…. Her stories showed at once a striking accomplishment in evoking scenes and settings; as yet, however, character—in its solid and enduring aspect—interested her rather less than the characteristic pose.

Bravado, the quality above all others she noticed in Anglo-Irish writing, is discernible in her own—but bravado with all sense of the flashy removed….

England made her a novelist, by firing her imagination; but Ireland had already marked out her way of seeing. Toughness, melancholy, wit, and a stubborn, oblique romanticism that feeds on loss are among her characteristics….

In the best of Elizabeth Bowen's writing there is hardly an incident or an image that does not have reverberations or draw into its orbit different kinds of complex feelings. By comparison her earliest stories, delightful though they are, are bound to seem slight; they are constructed on one plane only. They abound in swift, vivid perceptions … but lack the sense of undercurrent that distinguishes her later work. This begins to be apparent in "The Tommy Crans" (the first story reprinted here under the heading "The Thirties"), with the feckless couple of the title kept in the background, and a debilitating emotional delicacy (a recurring trait) informing its principal characters. Then, after a foretaste of Elizabeth Bowen's electrifying use of atmosphere in "Look at All Those Roses," we reach the remarkable group of wartime stories.

"Look at All Those Roses" opens with a commonplace mishap—engine failure on a quiet road—and quickly shifts into an area of near-poetic intensity, without losing anything of its down-to-earth flavor. It is Elizabeth Bowen's ability to invest the ordinary with the uncanny that makes this possible. The burning blossoms in the country garden, a damaged child in a wheelchair—a suggestion of violence, romantic in its unspokenness, connects these images. Even at this fairly early stage, Elizabeth Bowen had enough confidence to cut her story short at the most tantalizing moment; the reader is left with nothing but hints and guesses, and this adds greatly to the power of the narrative. But when the author tells us of Lou, the central character, that "her idea of love was adhesiveness" we are back with the plain, wry voice of disenchantment. It's a familiar tone; you might call it Irish asperity at its most pointed.

In "Attractive Modern Homes" an ordinary young woman in a housing development experiences a kind of ecstasy of despair (the closest she will ever get to insight) which lasts for the duration of the story: at the end the old social habits, politeness to neighbors, self-assertion, mild disparagement of husbands, start to reassert themselves. The ambitious "The Disinherited," in which a corrupt poor relation sells her kisses to her aunt's bleak chauffeur, establishes effectively a mood of decay…. (p. 23)

Prothero, the chauffeur, with his melodramatic history, represents an instance of Elizabeth Bowen's tendency, especially pronounced during the Thirties, to incorporate into her fiction episodes straight out of the popular press. Lurid accidents, outbreaks of murder are zestfully re-created as ghost stories, comic horror pieces … or psychological dramas…. Her feeling for the supernatural—which, austerely, she kept out of her novels—finds an outlet in stories like these, where it often becomes an invigorating force. When her objective is not to explore to the fullest the power of suggestion (as in "The Cat Jumps"), or to devise a kind of embodiment for the numinous, she can have fun with her ghosts. (pp. 23-4)

Elizabeth Bowen can be a deadly observer of social ploys and foibles. She views infelicitous or unruly behavior with coolness and amusement…. [In] even the most perplexed or disturbing of her narratives, an oblique comic vision can be detected doing its work. Her own emotions are never caught up in anything mawkish, as Katherine Mansfield's sometimes were. When we find a "dear little table lamp, gaily painted with spots to make it look like a toadstool" (in "Mysterious Kôr"), we know this object is far from being "dear" to the author.

There is an element of sarcastic admiration … in Elizabeth Bowen's treatment of children. Childhood, with its fickleness, its odd formalities, its devious attachments and antipathies, always engaged her deepest interests. The children in her fiction are seen with a peculiar clarity, whether they are pert schemers [comically blundering, or harrowed by some unmentionable stress]…. It is true, as she said, that in childhood nothing is banal; inexperience means a capacity to be perpetually stimulated. However, "it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence"—this curt declaration says much about Elizabeth Bowen's temperament. Loss of innocence, betrayal, the "wrecking of an illusion" she found to be characteristic of Katherine Mansfield's stories: these are also major themes in her work, as they were in Henry James's, but always enlarged by paradox, irony, and complication; she relished the incalculable too. She is adept at isolating moments of strung-up awkwardness or incommunicable dismay….

Elizabeth Bowen's Demon Lover [(1945)] stories give shape to "a particular psychic London"—a London, moreover, distorted by the effects of war…. The stories deal with psychic dislocation too: in the marvelous "The Happy Autumn Fields" (the title taken from Tennyson's "The Princess") a fragment of intense experience in the life of an unknown Victorian girl blots out the present for the bomb-shocked heroine in her crumbling house.

The childhood trauma described in "Ivy Gripped the Steps," on the other hand, is the hero's own—a devastating instance of betrayal, casually disclosed. Gavin Doddington, revisiting in his forties the seaside town he last saw at the age of ten, remembers his childish infatuation for his mother's fascinating friend Mrs. Nicholson, whose guest he was, and the painful moment when he recognized the element of mockery in that lady's affection for him. He is one of those characters, common enough in Elizabeth Bowen's work, in whom some emotional faculty is significantly deadened.

No one understood better than she did the creative possibilities of evasiveness, the power of the unstated, the fascination of the unaccountable. Against such triumphs as we find in this collection, her failings—the mannered passages, periphrases, gratuitous convolution—can only seem negligible. She was—to adapt her own remark about Virginia Woolf—the extreme and final product of the Anglo-Irish liberal mind: elegant, restrained, always susceptible to sensation in its purest form. (p. 24)