One of the ways the world can be divided up is into those people for whom life only began when they grew up, and those for whom childhood remains the inescapably real world. Elizabeth Bowen belonged to the latter group; as Angus Wilson says in his introduction [to The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen,] she had 'one of the principal features of the great romantics—a total connection with her own childhood'. A concentrated reading of these 79 stories, written over half a century, confirms this view. Most of the strongest are about children, isolated and uncertain about who they belong to; staying in houses where they would rather not be, making attachments that do not hold, looking for an Eden of happiness that eludes them.

Even in her adult characters, the frightened child still cries. There is always the possibility that the loved one will disappear, does not care, is not what he seems, will die. Sometimes the dependence of childhood is made quite apparent in the adult—characters are crippled, or not quite all there, like the dotty heiress in 'Her Table Spread'.

The Bowen world is a world of women. Motherless herself from the age of 12, she depicts awkward, nervous girls, sexually undefined, for whom older women represent authority, sensuality, excitement. Men in the early stories are hazy escorts, or blunt instruments who disturb the world of feelings without fully entering into it….

As Angus Wilson writes here, 'she can be witty (though not, I think, very satisfactorily funny)'. The unsatisfactory nature of her funniness is evident in her ghost stories. In one of these, 'Foothold', a character asks whether the others have noticed that 'one may discuss ghosts quite intelligently, but never any particular ghost without being facetious.' She had identified the problem, but was not—except in 'The Happy Autumn Fields', a nostalgic dream of her native Ireland, conjured up in war-torn London—able to solve it.

Her sensitivity to the supernatural was part of her vision of the fragility of existence, of her feeling that the civilised surface might crack and all be plunged into chaos…. Overt sexuality is part of this: it breaks the dream, it is violent, perhaps something that only happens in a lower social class….

But all these tensions worked together for Elizabeth Bowen during the Second World War. The surface of life, of London, had indeed cracked; people's minds, in the Blitz, cracked too. In her war stories she charts the hallucinations and heightened perceptions that fear creates, as well as the material ravages to the city. In the best, 'Mysterious Kor', she describes London by night as looking like 'the moon's capital—shallow, cratered, extinct'…. It was only during the war, too, that she began to write about any real relation between men and women….

Her wartime stories were reportage—of the physical and metaphysical experiences of those who stayed in London. There is a journalistic element in much of her writing; but the nonliterary aspect of her personality that gave her a taste for melodrama and made her a reflector of the preoccupations of her class and her times has paid off. Clothes and houses are described obsessively; and the legacy to us of this obsession in the early stories is an unequalled sense of flashback to the 1920s and 1930s. She is fetishistic in her attention to gloves and shoes and hats…. One put pepper on one's muffins in the 1920s, and cushions were satin and had frills, and one used the pronoun 'one', it seems, very much more than one does today….

The remarkable thing, it seems to me, about Elizabeth Bowen's short fictions is the way they straddle the gulf between high art and popular romance….