Elizabeth Bowen has not written a short story as totally impressive as Lawrence's 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' or Joyce's 'The Dead', but she has produced the most consistent and extensive body of work in this form by any author writing in English…. Yet she has never been fully assimilated to the canon of modern English literature, and this failure of judgment on the critics' part is intimately connected with her mastery of the short story form.

The short story is allegedly un-English, a foreign mode indebted to Maupassant and Chekhov, excessively worked upon by Americans and Irish. (p. 19)

The ultimate and lasting impression which this entirely welcome collection will create is of Elizabeth Bowen's supremacy in responding to the civilian dimension of the second world war…. [Such] wartime stories as 'The Happpy Autumn Fields' are faultless embodiments of concentrated perception and intelligence…. The war provided her with the circumstances and symbols in which her art flourished: there was little thereafter to be said.

This centrality of the war in her career reminds us paradoxically of the Irishness; Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett (so different in every way) similarly found the war to identify a chasm in their own experience. For Elizabeth Bowen was not Irish in Joyce's sense; she was Anglo-Irish, her identity revolved round a hyphen, a linking minus. Meaning for such a writer involved the acknowledgment of two frequently hostile realities. 'Mysterious Kor', one of her final stories, sets up the remote and deserted city as antithesis to spectral London. This kind of fiction, closer, at times to a self-effacing allegory than to the classic mimetic novel, is illuminated more successfully by reference to Yeatsian masks than to the practice of the Greenes of the Murdochs.

'BREAKFAST,' her first attempt at fiction in 1923, displayed those distinctive features which characterised all her subsequent work. The second paragraph (all of it) reads:

They turned at his entrance profiles and three-quarter faces towards him. There was a silence of suspended munching and little bulges of food were thrust into their cheeks that they might wish him perfunctory good-mornings.

The paragraph, brief as a Jamesian parenthesis or briefer, appears itself to be perfunctory. Its dense, economical use of syntactical suavity and gross attention to appearance will recur in more refined work later. Though the style is modulated later, the same fundamental division persists. While the novels seek to assimilate this condition, the short stories are freer to render it purely as mood. These stories advance memorable characters, present vivid, precise pictures but this ultimate achievement lies elsewhere…. [The] element of narrative involving characters and action is a means to an ultimate distillation of mood. It seems pointless then to insist on Elizabeth Bowen as one who 'brilliantly portrayed classically English, reticent, emotionally secretive characters'. Her real strength as a writer of fiction lay in the external perspective in which she presented character and the emotional grammar with which she deployed character. (pp. 19-20)