[In The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen there] are echoes of mystery … like reverberations after an explosion that has not itself been heard. It was part of [Elizabeth Bowen's] subtlety that she dealt so often and so confidently in such shadows, in the ghosts that lurk beneath mundane reality, and in the inaccessible….

There are echoes of another kind in Elizabeth Bowen's stories, pattering through even the most English of them. These are the tell-tale hints of the Irish mood….

Nationality matters in novels and short stories only when it makes itself felt, and Elizabeth Bowen now belongs less to Ireland than to literature. But any assessment of her work, especially of her stories, cannot quite escape the lost world into which, as a person, she was born at just the wrong time. As a writer, she took part of her strength from that predicament….

No story here is unworthy of inclusion; a couple perhaps are on the way to becoming classics. Stories such as "A Day in the Dark", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The Happy Autumn Fields" are so coolly evocative that they have acquired in their relatively short lives a timeless hallmark. "The Demon Lover" has—technically—a flawlessness that no novel can ever have.

Elizabeth Bowen possessed the short-story writer's darting curiosity, and an imagination that could become lighter and more volatile than the novelist's. She wrote as hungrily about one subject as the next, finding her stories in the supernatural, in sexuality and love and friendship, in lives wasted, time wasted, in houses, families, dreams, nightmares, fantasies, happiness. Nothing could be more different from the over-ripe suppuration of "Her Table Spread" than the calmness turned to panic in "The Cat Jumps". The claustrophobia of "Breakfast" is a far cry from the sad imprisonments of "The Tommy Crans" or the wartime chatter of "Careless Talk". The single common obsession is a concern for the truth about the human condition.

Her own statement that she was inspired by the unfamiliar is borne out in story after story. She came to know England well, but always wrote about the English from an angle which suggests a stranger on the edge of a circle of friends….

The value of this outsider's view was something she strongly sensed: having established her role as that of a traveller forever on the way either to Holyhead or Dun Laoghaire, she stuck to it rigorously….

Naturally, some of these stories are less successful than others. A few are slight, several somewhat flat, others tinged with obscurity. The effort of achieving an effect often shows, so that a story—or part of one—seems breathless and over-written. I don't agree with Angus Wilson that Elizabeth Bowen did not have an ear for the speech patterns of those outside her own class; but I do think that more than occasionally, when searching for the common touch, she failed to find it and caused a certain amount of damage by trying….

A story I have already mentioned, "The Cat Jumps", is one of her most renowned but it seems to me to suffer rather badly in this kind of way. It tells of a house in which a murder has been committed and which is later bought by a no-nonsense couple who refuse to be affected by the shadow of drama. A weekend party is marvellously observed…. The atmosphere, the interplay of the previous owners and the present ones, the vitality that appears to have possessed the house but no longer does, is brilliantly and wittily conveyed. The story gets nicely going but then, close to the end, there is a sudden disastrous change of mood; like a fog, disbelief descends.

But even Elizabeth Bowen's failures have interest enough to fascinate. She did not "develop" or improve (few short-story writers do) but she did set her own standards and must in the end be judged by them. She was well aware that the short story is the art of the glimpse, that in craftily withholding information it tells as little as it dares. She likened what she called the "short storyist" to the poet, since both must be able to "render the significance of the small event". With style and affection she celebrated that exercise herself: the creation of something memorable out of practically nothing, the glimpsing of the gold beneath the dross.