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The Elizabeth Bowen Review

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The Elizabeth Bowen Review ISSN 2517-2603 The Elizabeth Bowen Review Volume 2, September 2019 Editors Nicola Darwood (University of Bedfordshire, UK) [email protected] Nicholas Turner (University of Central Lancashire, UK) [email protected] Editorial Board Aimee Gasston (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) Ann Rea (University of Pittsburgh, USA) Michael Waldron (University College Cork, Ireland) Frances White (University of Chichester, UK) Advisory Board Maud Ellmann, (University of Chicago, USA) Jessica Gildersleeve (University of Southern Queensland, Australia) Allan Hepburn (McGill University, Canada) Chris Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) Patricia Laurence (City University of New York, USA) Petra Rau (University of East Anglia, UK) Patricia Juliana Smith (Hofstra University, USA) Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex, UK) Eibhear Walshe (University College Cork, Ireland) Editorial policy All submissions are subject to double blind peer review. We welcome submissions on all aspects of Elizabeth Bowen’s life and work. Completed essays (6,000 words including bibliography and footnotes) should be submitted by 31st January 2020 for Volume 3 (to be published in September 2020). If you would like to discuss a possible submission, please contact the editors (details above). The views expressed in the Review are those of the contributors, and are not those of the editors. © the contributors, 2019 2 This volume of the Elizabeth Bowen Review is dedicated to the memory of Evelina Garay-Collcutt, who very sadly passed away just a week before publication. Evelina’s delight in and knowledge of Bowen was very apparent when she gave a paper at the conference in June; it is also evident in her essay in this volume. 3 Table of Contents Nicola Darwood & Nick Turner ~ Introduction ............................................................ 5 Eibhear Walshe ~ ‘Elsewhere’: Desired landscapes in the writings of Elizabeth Bowen ........................................................................................................................................ 7 Kezia Whiting ~ Imprints of Style: The Last September ............................................ 20 Evelina Garay-Collcutt ~ Utopic and Dystopic Connections in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Stories ‘Mysterious Kôr’ and ‘Gone Away’ ......................................................... 36 Ana Ashraf ~ The Spectral, the Uncertain ‘I’ and the Spectacle in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover ......................................................................................................... 48 Carissa Foo ~ Patriarchal Hauntings and Feminist Exorcisms in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Stories ................................................................................................................. 59 Layla Ferrández Melero ~ ‘There Was Certainly Something in the Girl:’ Sydney as a Sapphist Character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel ................................................... 71 Nicola Darwood and Nick Turner ~ Conference Report ............................................. 85 Contributors ................................................................................................................. 87 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 89 4 Nicola Darwood & Nick Turner ~ Introduction We are delighted to publish Volume Two of the Elizabeth Bowen Review, a scholarly journal devoted to the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. In this issue, and the issues that will follow every year, you will find essays on a range of fiction, stories and other writings by Bowen, using ever new perspectives and discovering previously unconsidered themes and allusions. Bowen is an exciting writer in the twenty-first century, just as much as she was in her lifetime. The Elizabeth Bowen Review aims to transmit our enthusiasm to readers and scholars across the world. Our aim is to produce an inclusive journal which welcomes submissions from all those interested in Bowen scholarship, from doctoral students to established scholars. The journal is a product of the editors’ combined enthusiasm for the work of Bowen, which began at an international conference in Warsaw in June 2016 organised by the Interdisciplinary Research Foundation. Our enthusiasm then led to a second and a third international conference at the University of Bedfordshire in 2017 and 2019, and to the parallel creation of the Elizabeth Bowen Society, which was officially launched at the conference in 2017. The aim of these ventures—conferences and the society—is to foster a community of enthusiasts for Bowen’s diverse work, to keep the writer ‘alive’. The journal is thus part of a wider project: not just to enhance scholarship, but also to unite scholars and readers. We have been delighted to be assured that Elizabeth Bowen is being researched and read across the world, producing an exciting body of criticism and postgraduate dissertations focusing on themes such as trauma, displacement, memory and identity, reading Bowen in the context of Ireland and War, and modernist studies: students and scholars continue to discover the depths and timeliness of Bowen. We are also delighted by the support which has been given freely by both the editorial board and the advisory board, without whom this journal would not have been possible. The essays in this issue are a testament to Bowen’s continuing power to excite and unsettle us in the best of ways, to be a writer whose possibilities for analysis are never exhausted. Eibhear Walshe’s investigation into the use of place and setting in Bowen’s art opens new perspectives on how her writing developed and changed over her life, and the importance of biographical experience in understanding her work. Walshe reveals how Bowen‘s representation of landscapes of loss trace her changing relationship with her aestheticized Irish and English landscapes and places, through a range of her texts, including The Last September, a number of her short stories from The Demon Lover, and Other Stories (a recurring focus in this volume of the Elizabeth Bowen Review) and A Time in Rome, a text which has received very little academic attention. The second essay by Kezia Whiting argues that Elizabeth Bowen’s free indirect style is essential to a radical reworking of political and subjective boundaries in The Last September. Whiting shows how the novel’s Anglo-Irish historical context allows Bowen to interweave internality and externality, subjectivity and objectivity, in characteristically modernist style. Evelina Garay-Collcutt places the well-known short story ‘Mysterious Kôr’ next to the lesser known ‘Gone Away’, to argue that Bowen’s art contains cities which present both dystopic and utopic features, showing 5 her concern for the future of the western concept of civilisation amid an age of political unrest, and her anxiety with regard to the disintegration, disappearance or reconstruction of emblematic cities. Ana Ashraf also discusses Bowen’s short fiction in The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945). Ashraf shows how war is represented through the perspective of bewildered human experience in these stories, the ghostliness of the characters and places indicating the erosion of everyday reality and a search for alternative spaces, allowing us to understand how survival can be understood through the act of narration. The penultimate essay, by Carissa Foo, continues the theme of ghosts to interrogate how Bowen’s women find themselves face-to-face with ghosts from the past in their homes, and how the haunted house breaks the archetype of feminine space and awakens women. Foo shows how the haunted house reflects the perversity of a phallocentric world that women themselves are complicit in preserving, where there is a struggle with patriarchal ghosts, which is a manifestation of the struggles women face in the real world. Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel, is the focus of the final essay in this volume, as Layla Ferrández Melero discusses the formation of Sydney’s character. Ferrández Melero particularly considers the relationship between Mrs. Kerr and Sydney, as the young woman, just past adolescence, tries to negotiate a pathway in life which enables her to be true to herself, but who realises that to do so, might lead to societal disapproval. The work of the scholars in this publication shows passion for Bowen’s writing, and reveals how contemporary a writer Bowen can be in her understanding of the effect of place, movement, war and the home on her characters, and how linguistic style can mirror breaking boundaries; for Bowen, the world was disrupted, fragmented, yet fluid and exciting. In her novels, short stories and travel writing, Elizabeth Bowen demonstrated an originality and mysteriousness that have transcended place and time, with the result that, nearly a century later, fascinating questions remain to be solved. The issues explored in these essays will add to the body of knowledge about Elizabeth Bowen, her life and her work, and hope that they stimulate further research and potential contributions to the third volume of The Elizabeth Bowen Review. Nick Turner and Nicola Darwood September 2019 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 6 Eibhear Walshe ~ ‘Elsewhere’: Desired landscapes in the writings of Elizabeth Bowen ‘There can be no woman, in anything like Livia’s position, for whom elsewhere is not at times the desired land’ (A Time in Rome) In this essay, I want to address the question of what form Bowen’s representation of
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