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Elizabeth Bowen is recognized as a major twentieth-century British writer. Her novels, stories, and family history, Bowen's Court, chronicle the impact of Anglo-Irish social and political upheaval on the personal lives and relations of her characters. Her novels of manners, such as The Death of the Heart (1938), expose the fragility of a traditional society in their psychological studies of men and women torn between social convention and personal expression. Her celebrated World War II fictions - the novel The Heat of the Day (1949) and stories such as "Mysterious Kor" - dramatize the tenuous psychological controls of people caught in the chaos of war. Bowen's acute analysis of individual and social psychology resonate in the works of such contemporary writers as Anita Brookner and Eudora Welty. In this first comprehensive study of Bowen's short stories, Phyllis Lassner lucidly and concisely examines Bowen's major themes and concerns. Characterized by their immediacy and what they suggest rather than state, the stories in Encounters and The Collected Stories, among others, reveal Bowen's lifelong attention to women's roles. Although closely related to the novels, the stories are distinct in their artistic achievement. In her discussions of such masterworks as "The Disinherited Summer Night" and "The Happy Autumn Fields", Lassner reveals that Bowen's most effective stories are those in which she has subtly inserted wry critiques of the role of traditional social codes in the formation of gender. This much-needed study of the short fiction includes excerpts from Bowen's own statements on writing as well as an excellent sampling of critical approaches to her work.
About the author
By Phyllis Lassner
Summary
Elizabeth Bowen is now recognized as a major British novelist and short story writer. Phyllis Lassner shows how Bowen's Anglo-Irish heritage made her an astute critic of women's possibilities and constraints. In a reassessment of Bowen's major fiction, The Last September, Friends and Relations, To the North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and ^IThe Heat of the Day, the author shows how Bowen's novels of manners and sensibility also revise traditional notions of female character. This feminist reading of Bowen's life and novels explores her concerns for women's creative and sexual expression in a society where great social change threatens traditional values. At a time when women were achieving professional careers and making independent choices for their personal lives, Bowen's novels provide a critique of the literary and social conventions which constrained women in maternal roles. Phyllis Lassner shows how contemporary feminist theory establishes Bowen's compelling importance for contemporary readers.
