As summer days get longer, my reading time increases, and I often have the urge to use summertime to explore the work of one writer fully, rather than jump around. If you are also looking for one brilliant writer to spend the summer with, consider Elizabeth Bowen. Reading Bowen’s prose gives me much of the same joy as reading poetry. In The Last September, Bowen writes: “She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.” The Last September was an early novel, published in 1929, when Bowen was only thirty. She published into the late 1960s and died in 1973.
Elizabeth Bowen’s prose creates a dreamy, surreal world for her readers. In Ivy Gripped the Steps, published in 1946, Bowen writes: “The search for indestructible landmarks in a destructible world led many down strange paths. The attachment to these when they had been found produced small worlds-with-worlds of hallucination—in most cases, saving hallucination. Writers followed the paths they saw or felt people treading, and depicted these little dear saving illusory worlds.” The world feels so very “destructible” right now, and to me, Bowen’s works are exactly these “saving hallucinations” we need.
Bowen left a rich legacy of novels and stories, more than enough to give modern readers an opportunity to live in her world for a while. I don’t want to give any plot summaries here; I’d rather give examples of her sensitive, gorgeous prose, so you can decide if she’s the right writer for you to explore this summer:
From The Hotel (published in 1927): “Men came in without their wives and did not always look up when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully and ate with an air of temporizing, off the tips of their forks. When the husbands did come in it seemed a long time before there was something to say. It seemed odder than ever to Sydney, eyeing these couples, that men and women should be expected to pair off for life.”
From The Heat of the Day (published in 1949): “Louie began to turn her head heavily this way, that way, under some oppression she might or might not elude. She was sitting on the hearthrug, by way of leaning against a chair, but the chair kept skidding away behind her, so also she had to support herself on her hands. Her long strong legs, stretched out in front of her, had by the latening of autumn been forced into stockings: already these were covered with lumpy darns.”
Most of Bowen’s works are still in print, but there’s also an abundance of beautiful used copies of Bowen’s work floating around. I love older editions. As styles of covers and page lay-outs have changed over the years, older editions give the reader a chance to see Bowen’s books the way she herself might have seen them.
Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions) and Experiment 116 (Counterpath Press). Mosteirin is co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books) and Perceptron (punctum books). Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books in Hanover, NH.
