Elizabeth Bowen

by Phyllis Lassner

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 sug