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  • Sartorial Connections: Fashion, Clothes, and Character in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North
  • Vike Martina Plock (bio)

In theory, dress is an art. The architecture of textiles ought to rank only less high than the architecture of stone in so far as textiles are less durable.1

Elizabeth Bowen’s writing eludes critical definition. Generically fluid, her novels and short stories include aspects of the ghost story, the spy thriller, the gothic romance, the comedy of manners, the classical realist novel, and the Anglo-Irish “big house” novel. As its author vehemently claims in her unfinished autobiographical sketch Pictures and Conversations, “Bowen terrain cannot be demarcated on any existing map; it is unspecific.”2 Due partly to this conceptual elasticity and partly to the myth-inspiring eccentricity of the author’s biography, literary scholars continue to incorporate her fiction in different critical fields.3 Even though she chose Ireland as a setting only for a marginal portion of her oeuvre, the new field of Irish Studies was nonetheless instrumental in putting Bowen onto the critical map in the 1980s and 90s. Scholars such as Vera Kreilkamp have argued persuasively that the “tensions and discordances of her Anglo-Irish experience” are central to understanding Bowen’s art.4 But the responsiveness of Bowen’s fiction to conventional modes of writing also emphasizes its formal mutability. Although Virginia Woolf is commonly considered “Bowen’s friend, mentor and, in some ways, her model as modern, professional female author,”5 an unpublished letter in the Elizabeth Bowen collection in the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin reveals that Bowen regularly sent her work to another, more unlikely, reader for critical inspection: [End Page 287] Agatha Christie.6 Positioning Bowen accordingly between the successful crime writer and the high priestess of literary modernism suggests that her writing lends itself to both the “high-brow” and the “popular.” Thus there are clear links between Bowen’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and the innovative experimentalism of the literary avant-garde. At the same time, her fiction’s apparent focus on “feminine experiences” such as love, manners, and the domestic is in line with the conventions of the mainstream novel. Hence Nicola Humble’s suggestion that Bowen’s “intellectual abstruse novels” are best positioned “at the highbrow end of the middlebrow.”7

Many recent attempts at critically locating Bowen’s fiction, however, foreground its simultaneous reliance on realist and modernist literary conventions.8 This article aims to intervene in this ongoing debate by considering the central role that clothes and fashion play in Bowen’s novel To the North. Bowen’s narrative relies heavily on textiles and fabrics in the development of character and plot. But while dresses, frocks, and other sartorial markers loom large in her fiction, Bowen’s novel sidesteps the overt dependence on materiality and description that distinguishes the realist novel she inherited from such writers as Henry James or Edith Wharton. As we shall see, clothes, like no other objects in Bowen’s novel, carefully orchestrate her representation of the connections that exist among characters’ interior composition, their intersubjective relations, and the exterior landscape. In To the North, clothes literally connect people. For that reason, it is Bowen’s enthusiasm for representing the world of material objects—a feature conventionally associated with classical realism—that provides, incongruously perhaps, an opportune moment to interrogate Bowen’s own relationship to the aesthetics of literary modernism.

Bowen’s personal encounters with the world of fashion were far from opportune. Apparently, her “dress sense” was “atrocious” at the time of her marriage to Alan Cameron, who took on the daunting task of organizing her wardrobe.9 Victoria Glendinning, Bowen’s biographer, notes that “large earrings, necklaces of false pearls or great glass bobbles, and flashy fake jewellery” were classic Bowen accessories.10 One glance at existing photographs of Bowen makes clear that she was hardly a trend-setter when it came to matters of personal appearance. By the same token, Bowen’s busy career as a journalist for Vogue and Mademoiselle in the 1940s and 50s11 might well have been spurred, as Allan Hepburn suggests, by “the necessity of paying household bills” to keep her ancestral home Bowen’s Court...

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