7 Though the real canonization of the “revolutionary” 1930s came in the similarly revolut (.)ĢLike the orphans who populate Bowen’s novels, 1930s fiction seems to stick out of place.I want to suggest in this essay that the conversation about placing Elizabeth Bowen is aligned with the conversation about placing 1930s fiction her novels of the 1930s create an aesthetic that could only belong to that similarly orphaned decade. And yet, for decades now, scholars have felt compelled to try to make her fit somewhere.
She seems to be, like so many of her characters, an orphan. As Luke Thurston writes in a 2013 special issue of Textual Practice, Bowen is an “exemplary artist of non-belonging 5”.
In short, Bowen’s work – and the critical reception of it – has always troubled scholarly categories. She has been adopted as a darling of feminist criticism despite her own assertion, “I am not, and shall never be, a feminist 4”. Her work has been categorized as a return to Jamesian psychological realism in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, and, conversely, as a dissolution of the novel itself 3. Born in June 1899, she is half a generation older than “the Auden Generation” and not quite a generation younger than “The Pound Era”, to contextualize by scholarly book title 2. Anglo-Irish, Bowen herself once remarked that she felt most at home in the middle of the Irish Sea, being seen as English in Ireland and Irish in England. As Phyllis Lassner remarks in a 2010 review essay in Modernism/Modernity, “the critical dilemma has always been one of situating and stabilizing Bowen’s oeuvre and style in literary history and theory… in short, as a writer and as a person, Bowen’s identity is a trouble-maker 1”. 5 Luke Thurston, “Double Crossing: Elizabeth Bowen’s Ghostly Short Fiction.” Textual Practice 2 (.)ġIt is by now a scholarly convention to open a discussion of Elizabeth Bowen with the problem of “placing” her.4 Quoted in Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, Edinburgh, Edinbur (.).3 See Hermione Lee’s Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981), and Andrew Be (.).2 See Samuel Hynes’ The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's, New (.).1 Phyllis Lassner, “Out of the Shadows: The Newly Collected Elizabeth Bowen.” Modernism/Moderni (.).
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