Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (review)

Neil Corcoran takes his title from Bowen's essay "Out of a Book," in which she outlines the writer's dual gift and predicament: "The apparent choices of art are nothing but addictions, pre-dispositions. . . . The aesthetic is nothing but a return to images that will allow nothing to take their place; the aesthetic is nothing but an attempt to disguise and glorify the enforced return" (10). Corcoran's Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return focuses largely on two "enforced returns" in Bowen's fiction: the return to past reading, the "compost of forgotten books" Bowen saw as forming her own identity; and the ceaseless return to Ireland in her novels and short stories. Corcoran's study is divided into three parts. The first, "Ireland," examines those texts with a specifically Irish setting: Bowen's Court, The Last September, A World of Love, and "The Back Drawing-Room," which Corcoran argues convincingly is "most definitely an Irish story too" (31) in spite of its English setting. The second, "Children," focuses on The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout, while the third, "War," turns to The Demon Lover and Other Stories and The Heat of the Day. To an extent, the divisions are arbitrary, as Corcoran makes his own enforced return to Ireland in each section due to the characteristic "detour to Ireland" (21) in Bowen's texts: Karen's trip to Ireland in Part II of The House in Paris, Matchett's speech in The Death of the Heart, which is "undoubtedly in part a bow to Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses" (120), the suggestion of Victorian Ireland in "Happy Autumn Fields," the self-conscious parallels of "garrison society" in London and Anglo-Ireland in The Heat of the Day.

Bowen is, for Corcoran, both hopelessly belated, in her allegiance to, and revision of, the plots of James, Dickens, Tennyson, Rider Haggard, Shakespeare and Flaubert, and covertly prophetic: "she was in advance of her time, a writer whose real operations went in disguise, a writer with whom we must catch up" (15). While "deeply impressed by the ambitions of High Modernism . . . she never entirely loses touch with classic realism and its customary methods" (4). She is also, however, relentlessly of her time, the chronicler of the death of Anglo-Ireland and the London blitz. According to Corcoran, her belatedness is in fact a strength: Bowen takes the opportunity to make her enforced return to Irish Protestant Gothic, or the nineteenth-century novel of adultery, a sustained attempt at generic revision: "So it is radically insufficient, for instance, for critics of Bowen to notice an indebtedness to, say, Henry James, without noticing also how we may read James differently in Bowen's later light" (6). Corcoran carries this through in his study of The Death of the Heart, reading Portia as a revision of the Jamesian child heroine: "she is revised with a woman's knowledge and eye, with a differently gendered interiority; and the consequence for Bowen's fiction may even find a fault in James" (6). The House in Paris is read as a challenge to the nineteenth-century French tradition of the female novel of adultery, with the focus shifted to the (unusually in this tradition) male child. Given his references to Daniel Deronda in the chapter on Bowen's Court, I'm surprised not to see it feature here. Leopold may share his forename and religion with "the most famous literary Jew written by a gentile" (97), but his predicament and the story unfolded by his attempt to meet his mother is much more redolent of George Eliot than James Joyce.

Corcoran's readings are detailed and sensitive, but academics can also suffer from belatedness; his book perhaps suffers by comparison with recent excellent works on Bowen—Bennett and Royle's Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1995) and Maud Ellmann's Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003)—by their side his readings could come...