A Greener Gothic: Environment and Extinction in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945)

“Elizabeth Bowen was a gardener,” the English novelist Penelope Lively (herself a keen horticulturist) suspected, remarking on how the Irish writer “frequently gives fictional space to gardens, or flowers, and with intent” (54). Lively comments that Bowen “can flourish a garden to define the personality of its owner” (55) and references a striking description of dahlias in The Little Girls (1964): “some dwarf, some giant, some corollas like blazons, some close-fluted, some velvet, some porcelain or satin, some darkening, some burning like a flame or biting like acid into the faint dusk now being given off by the evening earth” (17). Certainly, as Lively concludes in Life in the Garden, Bowen “knew a thing or two about dahlias” (55).

Such concrete botanical knowledge is frequently visible in Bowen’s numerous literary representations of flowers, as well as of trees, plants, and gardens—an aspect of her imagination that complicates her reputation as a writer chiefly fascinated by the great indoors. Gardening and images of the organic also functioned for Bowen as a means of conceptualizing creativity and its cultural productions. She describes the bestseller as “rather like a pretty annual, you’ve got a nice show of flowers and leaves, but when they wither, there’s nothing left at all,” whereas “[t]he other sort of book is more like a tree. It’s quite true that while the leaves are out, it looks especially attractive, but even when they’re gone there’s a trunk, a solid shape left” (Listening In 264). She revised her manuscripts “like one prunes—snipping away dead wood” (269), and literary influences on a developing writer are “rather like a palisade round a young growing tree” (328). “For the work—the writing—itself,” she preferred “an as nearly as possible quiet room. [. . .] I like best trees outside the window. As to this, in London I’m fortunate—I live overlooking a park. And in Ireland my old home, where I do much work, is deep in the heart of the country” (90). Bowen characterized herself as rural rather than urban by temperament, her ideal home being a “house in the country; enough but not too much garden” (232; my emphasis). That qualifier is intriguing: what might it mean to have too much garden? Bowen’s curious phrase suggests an anxiety about the natural world and its abundant procreative potential that is implicitly threatening—a motif that will be central to the argument developed in the following pages. Psychologically as well as imaginatively, the natural world was of immense significance to Bowen’s life and writing, unlocking heretofore unexplored dimensions of her fiction.

Critics have generally been preoccupied with Bowen’s manmade architecture and domestic interiors. Studies of her short fiction especially have oriented themselves around the house—and with good reason.¹ Houses are central to Bowen’s imagination and dominate three of the areas in which she is most often studied: the gothic, Irish Studies, and World War II. Houses lend themselves in obvious ways to gothic narrative; they gain a particular poignancy in writing about the big house that, as British colonial power waned in the early twentieth century, no longer dominated but rather haunted the Irish landscape. Houses also multiply in Bowen’s war writing, figuring the sudden fragility of what had seemed invulnerable.² Both contexts—Anglo-Ireland and World War II—foreground violence, transience, and loss, but also a kind of ghostliness: these were buildings haunted both by the past and by the imminence of their own destruction. Although the natural world has long been an impetus central to gothic imaginings, it has received rather less exacting critical attention.³ I focus here on The Demon Lover (1945), a group of short stories that Bowen wrote during World War II, and argue that foregrounding the significance of the natural world in shaping her depiction of wartime London reveals an under appreciated aspect of her literary imagination—especially in its more gothic reaches. The intersection of domestic space and what might be described...