[Bowen was an Anglo-Irish fiction writer and critic. In the following essay, she reviews My Ireland.]

Lord Dunsany, perhaps a little disorientated by the largeness of his publisher's invitation, halts and hovers rather over his opening chapters, then drops into his swing and writes an engaging book. High-handed, whimsical, bland, touchy, reactionary, and impossible to pin down to any point, here he has it all his own way—and what a way it is. My Ireland has, throughout, a sort of contrary soundness. It is written to please himself and, please God, infuriate others. The merit of the completely personal book is that it often captures, or rather blunders upon, that general quality that makes literature. This title (not his own choice) with its possessive smugness is certainly putting-off; one is led to expect some more of those whimsical retrospections to which the country have been too prone lately. "I shall never forget how the mountains looked as I hacked home, etc." But here the relation felt between the man and his land is profound, subtle and reticent. The retrospections are pungent, and are so defiantly mustered that they escape sentiment. Here is, for Ireland, more than sheltered affection: this goes back further than Eton, a turn for the twilight of history, or the Kildare Street Club.

And here is, for this author, a refreshing absence of mystic experience. What dominates the book is satisfied love of a country, body and spirit—love which the too apt pen, by making articulate, has too often denatured or falsified: here it is not falsified.

In these pages, Lord Dunsany may be tendentious—in fact, he is clearly out to be tendentious, with his Sackville Street, his pouncing inverted commas, his little digs at the new Ireland that are about as playful as would be the nudges of a surviving bog moose—but he is not phony. His feelings are too furious to exploit. The finest part of his book, written in Ireland last winter, is more or less of a journal and is about shooting. Turgenev, Tolstoi, stake no claim on this as a subject; Lord Dunsany's experiences and reflections are his own. Art these days shows signs of decamping from enlightened Metroland, where it has lodged so uneasily; Horseback Hall is coming into its own again; we have had quite enough, for a bit, about the country from the kind hiker's angle; kindness to huntable animals is once more at a discount: art shows a re-mellowed attitude to sport. In fact, there is now in sight rather too much extraversion and blood. But at this still apposite moment comes Lord Dunsany, squelching about Irish midland bogs with his gun, full of bloodthirsty tenderness and of rude poetry either unselfconscious or raised to the hyperconsciousness of art. He is authentic, full of tips (care of shooting boots) and of plain facts:

The outwitting of golden plover depends, in one of its branches, on going to the right spot in a hedge, while another man goes round to the far side of a field and drives them over. But I did not go to the right spot in the hedge, and only got one. Then I drew a small snipe-bog blank because it had been drained. But my gamekeeper pointed out that there was no harm in that, for it would be just the same again in two or three years. And this is undoubtedly true, for soil and air in Ireland seem to be at one in bringing back the bog to its own, wherever man has lifted the spade against it. The soil seems to work for the bog, while the damp air fights against man. And so the spade is laid by, and the bog steals softly back; and in a few years there it is again, as though man had never troubled its ancient stillness … Memorials to this struggle may be found all over Ireland, and they mostly seem memorials to the victors, the wind and the weather.

All through: the romantic, endemic feeling for ruin:

One does not fully understand Ireland if one overlooks the pace at which ruin floats on the gentle wind, and the grudge that the Irish soil seems to bear to civilisation. Earth seems to triumph in the end over civilisation everywhere, but a few decades in Ireland seem to have powers to bring down to oblivion, such as only comes with a thousand years to Egypt.

There is more, of course, to a book like this than shooting—there are personalities, hunts, legends, gossip, landscape and extinct cricket fields, now in pasture. Nostalgic and measured prose, that is at the same time vigorous, hangs over all this an iridescent veil. The book is not very happily illustrated by photographs of a Come-to-Ireland nature: these have little relation to Lord Dunsany's prose.

Lord Dunsany's turn of mind is his own, but his nature, his habit of living, are generic, inherited. The old regime throws out from time to time its artists, sports like this, minds that show degrees of creative, sometimes poetic, power—overbearing fantasists. Oddly enough—or is it odd?—lordly art has almost always a rude, sometimes not far from vulgar, and somehow saving quality: it may be orchidaceous, but it is rooted. Too cerebral bourgeois art, with its lack of attachments, is on the whole more often brittle, and so, ephemeral. There exists in one kind of art a touch of the peasant toughness that Proust saw in the Guermantes. For pages together in My Ireland, Lord Dunsany chooses to show himself as a quite impossible person—complacently dream-bound, overbearingly blind. Many might wish to displace him. But he has gone to the making of his Ireland, and his Ireland is valid—rich as peat with its memories, ignorant, but impossible to ignore.