The House in Paris

Book Description

When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Henrietta longs to see a few sights in the foreign city; little does she know what fascinating secrets the Fisher house itself contains.
For Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the relations between Leopold, Henrietta’s agitated hostess Naomi Fisher, Leopold’s mysterious mother, his dead father, and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalizingly. And when Henrietta leaves the house that evening, it is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge usually reserved only for adults. One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most artful and psychologically acute novels, The House in Paris is a timeless masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere, and represents the very best of Bowen’s celebrated oeuvre.

Customer Reviews:

The Moment before Adulthood .......2007-09-28

This is a charming saga of young Henrietta, 11, on her trip through Paris, changing trains and sent to stay with a grandmother's friend. She finds herself in the middle of a classic family drama involving Leopold, another child also at the house who turns out to be the love-child of a yound woman who lived there during a Paris stay some years ago. As the family's pathetic attempt to cover this up unravels, Henrietta--who is at that Carol Gilligan moment of moral clarity before sexual motives unfold in her own experience--finds out for herself what motivates the adults in the House.

A surprising ending occurs, that some of you will like in this book primarily about women, and others will find a deus ex machina.

Beautiful prose style, somewhat stifling plot.......2006-02-20

This is my first experience reading Elizabeth Bowen. Her prose style is terrific- flowing, evocative, and deep. But rather than a comedy of manners, this is something of a *tragedy* of manners, as nearly all the female adult characters wallow in self pity and paralysis, often for fear of expressing their feelings to the people they (should) care most about. The callousness with which the children are treated is appalling as well. So while the art of description is magnificent, I can't help but be thankful I don't live in the stifling world Bowen has created.

Between Romance and Convention.......2005-09-27

Magnificent! An altogether more mature novel than The Last September, leaner and richer at the same time. It is one of those books one wants simultaneously to speed through for the sake of the plot, and to linger over for the elegance and economy of the author's style and acuteness of her psychological insights. The Anchor edition serves it ill, I fear, by printing the revealing but otherwise excellent essay by A.S. Byatt as a preface rather than afterword, and by implying on the back jacket that the narrative is focused on the child Henrietta who, though brought to brilliant life, turns out to be a peripheral character. So one is at first confused by the shifts in viewpoint and authorial tone which are one of Bowen's strengths. And her subtlety in teasing out questions of personal identity between the competing powers of romance and convention is a delight from start to finish.

Highly recommended, although not perfect (how is that?).......2003-05-17

The House in Paris is my first encounter with Bowen's work and definitely won't be the last. She is a beautiful writer with occasional unidiomatic lapses which are compensated for in stunning paragraphs elsewhere. The scenes and characters come alive; the best way I can describe it is that they are "intensely lived." Bowen is never on autopilot. In particular, I found the scenes where Karen visits her aunt & uncle in Ireland and the scene in which Henrietta meets Mme. Fisher very evocative and enthralling despite the lack of anything much happening. Bowen also has a surehanded dramatic technique when needed.

I did find some weaknesses, which is why I give the novel 4 stars (but then the "degree of difficulty" is high). I don't ever find the romance between Karen and Max to be accessible; Bowen's portrayal is intentionally inscrutable. Though only nine, Leopold seems to think and speak like an adult. In general, I don't agree with Bowen's much praised portrayal of either child.

All in all, a very worthwhile, often intense novel.

This book is inspiring and thought provoking........1999-04-18

The House in Paris is about making choices.

It starts by introducing the reader to 11 year old Henrietta who passes through the House in Paris while on her way to visit her Grandmother in Mentone. We are later introduced to Leopold. He is a nine year old boy, going to visit his mother in the House in Paris, whom he has never met. The house belongs to Madame Fisher and her daughter Naomi.

The story then goes backwards, we find out how Leopold came to be. His mother had a tryst with Max while being engaged to someone else. Leopold's Father Max was Naomi's Fiance, whom he would have married had he not killed himself. I will not give the ending away, but the threads of the story come together and everyone has a connection to the house. Bowen's descriptive style of writing is evident throughout the chapters. I can guarantee readers that they won't want to put this book down. You wish the story wouldn't end.

Average customer rating:

The unkindness of civility

Elizabeth Bowen's finest!

blah

Mystifying prose

Bored to the Heart

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0385720173
Release Date: 2000-05-09

Amazon.com

Five words of advice on reading Elizabeth Bowen: Resist the urge to skim. In The Death of the Heart, Bowen's writing rolls ever onward, accruing the sensations and ironies of conscious living till the final effect is massive. This is not prose for people who like their fiction with a cool, Calvin Klein-like minimalism. Bowen's people are keenly aware, and she seems to catalogue every sweaty moment, every betraying glance. The reader must stay right there with her, because hidden among lengthy descriptions of sea air and drawing-room politics are pithy asides worthy of great humorists: "Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends." Skimmers miss out.

The Death of the Heart is Bowen's most perfectly made book. Portia, an orphan, comes to live in London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. A child of sin raised in a series of shabby French hotels, Portia is possessed of a kind of terrible innocence. Like Chance the Gardener in pigtails, she literally can't comprehend evil or unkind motives. Unfortunately for her, she falls in with Anna's friend Eddie, who seems to be made entirely of bad motives. Though the plot follows Portia's relationship with Eddie, the novel's real tension lies between Portia and Anna, as the girl comes to grief against the shoals of Anna's glittering, urbane cynicism. But the book transcends the theme of innocence corrupted. As in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Bowen inverts the formula to show the destructive power of innocence itself:

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous.... Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet--and when they do, their victims lie strewn all around.

Bowen has a fine eye for such shadings of morality, but finer still is her understanding of the way humans bump up against the material world. Her writing on weather, both emotional and meteorological, compares with the best of Henry James: "One's first day by the sea, one's being feels salt, strong, resilient, and hollow--like a seaweed pod not giving under the heel."

Always a sensitive observer of the way we live, in her lesser books Bowen deals in mind games and then delivers trumped-up, bloody endings. In The Death of the Heart, she keeps all the action between her characters' ears, and comes up with one of the great midcentury psychological novels. --Claire Dederer

Book Description

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.

In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London.There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and her fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reaason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal--and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.

Customer Reviews:

The unkindness of civility.......2006-03-22

First off, let me say that the Anchor paperback edition is a pleasure to read, as are all the Bowen novels in this series. It has clean generous type, a binding that stays open, a cover that feels good in the hand, an attractive and totally relevant illustration, typography that captures both Bowen's elegance and her modernity, and -- wonder of wonders -- a back-cover blurb that brilliantly encapsulates the essence of this elusive novel. For example: "As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sharp sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations."

Not for nothing does the book-jacket writer compare Elizabeth Bowen to Henry James. For this is a very Jamesian subject. The recently-orphaned 16-year-old Portia, Bowen's heroine, is significantly older than James' Maisie (WHAT MAISIE KNEW) and younger than his Isabel Archer (PORTRAIT OF A LADY), but like them she is thrust into sophisticated society as a naive observer, and the book is mainly taken up by the author's razor-sharp dissection of that society and sensitive exploration of the heroine's feelings.

What is surprising here, even in comparison to Henry James or to the other Elizabeth Bowen novels that I have read (THE LAST SEPTEMBER and THE HOUSE IN PARIS), is that so little actually happens. Everything seems to point to a premature sexual affair which will proves disastrous for Portia, especially once she falls for the charms of the caddish Eddie, whose previous dalliances we have already seen described. Portia herself is the offspring of her father's late-life affair, which has forced him to leave his life of English respectability and to live abroad; there is a sense of unreliability in the bloodline. Even the title of the book, THE DEATH OF THE HEART, and the subtitles of its three major parts -- "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil" -- all seem to be leading in this direction.

And yet, while sexuality is always present in the subtext (another Jamesian quality), it never tips over into action. This is a book in which so simple an event as Eddie's holding the wrong girl's hand at a movie can have traumatic significance; there is no need to go farther. I can only think that Bowen's misdirection is deliberate. In the course of waiting for something to happen, the reader finds that he has absorbed countless details and impressions of everyday life that, taken cumulatively, have an even more devastating effect. This book is like a timed-release drug capsule; you may feel comparatively little after you have finished reading it, but it continues to work in the mind long after you have put it down.

In her three-part structure, Bowen contrasts two different strata of English society. The outer sections are set in the upper-class world of Portia's half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, who live in an expensive house in one of the Nash Terraces fronting Regent's Park. Thomas is withdrawn and remote; Anna leads a busy social life with many male friends; they communicate only superficially with each other and hardly at all with Portia, who is forced to turn to the housekeeper, Matchett, as the nearest thing to a confidante. It is no wonder that she falls for Eddie, whom she sees as an outsider just like her. Meeting him at first assuages her loneliness, but his eventual small betrayals only serve to heighten it.

Contrasting with London society is a month that Portia spends with Anna's former governess Mrs. Heccomb, in an off-season seaside resort. Having been brought up in a similar resort town myself, I found Bowen's description of the wind-battered setting and the cheerfully rowdy life of the young people whom Portia meets there one of the most vivid sections of this excellently-observed book. While the apparently free-and-easy quality of this middle-class setting can be seen to have its own limitations and proprieties, it sends Portia back to town with an unbearable sense of the shallow frigidity of her life with Thomas and Anna. And the events of the weekend when Eddie comes down to join her, although slow to make their full effect, eventually alter their relationship (and Portia's view of herself) irretrievably.

One of the most poignant aspects of the book is its awareness of transience. Thomas and Anna are eminently settled in their house, their work, their society; even the constant motion of the Heccomb young people and their set is based on an underlying stability. But Portia's life has always been rootless, moving from one European hotel to another, staying out of season and in the cheapest rooms -- rootless with one vital exception: the security of her parents' love. Eddie's rootlessness is of a more dangerous variety, coming of having rejected the life of his still-living parents without creating anything significant of his own to replace it, but it takes Portia time to realize the essential difference between them. The theme is further reflected in one minor character who will become important at the end: the sad Major Brutt, who "had a good war" but has been rattling around since, growing rubber in Malaya, and now staying in a seedy London hotel waiting for something to turn up; it is a touching portrait, albeit a frightening one.

And what will happen to Portia? Will her heart remain dead? Is it indeed HER heart that dies? The book ends on a spiritual and psychological crisis, but it offers no resolution. Perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part, but I do not see her life ending in either tragedy or pathos, despite the book's title. Portia's first innocence has been dispelled, certainly, but there is an energy in her, a drive towards the good which I believe will enable her to learn from her experiences and ultimately rise above them. Not the least of the qualities of this admirable edition which I praised at the beginning is the cover painting, which goes far to contractict the implications of the title and declare that this wonderful novel is not, after all, depressing.

Elizabeth Bowen's finest!.......2005-12-19

It feels perfectly ridiculous to be sitting here alloting stars to a writer as established in the firmament as Elizabeth Bowen. She is one of the great contemporary writers, and she was teaching when I was in college. We were too young to be in awe of her, but reading or especially rereading Bowen is one of the greatest pleasures of a lifetime. This is my favorite of her novels, but she hasn't written a single one I don't admire. Enjoy the winter with Bowen on hand!

blah.......2004-03-15

i thought it sucked. it was boring and didnt catch my interest whatsoever.

Mystifying prose.......2002-07-16

I don't know what those who called this Bowen masterpiece "boring" expected of this novel. Perhaps they hoped for a simple, bland, beach-blanket novel they could skim in a day. I'm sure they were disappointed to find that this is an intense, at times intellectually difficult novel to read. Bowen's descriptions of the inner workings of an adolescent girl often require a second or third reading. This is not because her writing is dull or too enigmatic; it is because Bowen materializes the thoughts of an unconscious mind, thoughts that for some are difficult to understand because we do not realize we have them until they are before us on a white page. This is the genius of this novel; the poignancy of it is not in the plot but in Bowen's subtle display of humanity. This is not so much a novel as a psychological study, and it is brilliant. The simple-minded need not apply.

Bored to the Heart.......2002-06-15

Truly dull tale of an teenage girl who comes to live with a married older half brother and his wife. The wife is a gad about with lots of men friends who reads Portia's diary. The brother is a bore who can barely communicate with his sister and who doesn't like his wife's friends and is too timid to say anything.

The only person in the household who treats Portia as if she has the slightest bit of interest is Matchett the long time family servant. All the same the male vistors to the house are all captivated by Portia especially Eddie a friend of Anna's with a severe chip on his shoulder. Portia finally has enough of the betrayal's and revolts and runs away.

Book Description

John Halperin illuminates the connection between four fascinating people and the intersecting era in which they lived -the second "Georgian" age, the period in England between the two world wars.

Customer Reviews:

Intriguing lives, lazily written.......2004-11-26

This certainly isn't Lytton Strachey. Like Strachey and Richard Holmes, however, Halperin well realizes the inherent great enjoyability of very short biographies of extremely interesting people. There seems to be almost no original research here, and Halperin is willing to make an extremely shallow and lazy transition to an anecdote just to squeeze it in, but he does write with grace (and has an eye for a great story). Oddly, there's a running theme throughout the book: the perfidy of what Halperin extremely loosely calls "treason," although what he means by treason seems so broad at times as to be almost meaningless. The best lives here are of the stodgy George V and the hilariously irreverent Nancy Astor, because with both Halperin seems really to have a new angle he wants to bring out; while his willingness to applaud the late king for his steadfastness and decency as compared to his eldest son's thorough rottenness, it does not seem to occur to Halperin that Edward VIII's character might be in part due to his parents' legendarily neglectful cold and neglectful care. Halperin's extremely heavyhanded evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's novels are also a bit puzzling, although Bowen's exceptionally eventful life and character make up for his judgmentalism towards her fiction.

Lytton Lite.......2001-08-17

John Halperin takes Lytton Strachey as his model and provides four short lives of people he views as emblematic of the "second Georgian" era - King Geroge V himself, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby and Nancy Astor. The results are interesting without being particularly memorable. Halperin tells his stories in a plain documentary fashion, without much analysis and with none of the mordant wit or strong opinions of Strachey's nasty little classic. Such a straightforward approach works best if bolsered by extensive research, but the slim bibliography indicates a newspaper profile rather than an original and insightful work. All this being said, Bowen, Philby and Astor are interesting enough as people to making reading "Eminent Georgians" worthwhile. As for the good King George, it will take a much more persuasive writer to bring that admirable but dull monarch to life on the page.

Average customer rating:

The pangs of independence
"The façade of the house was like cardboard, without weight"
The end of an era
The Aching Self
"The façade of the house was like cardboard, without weight"

The Last September
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0385720149
Release Date: 2000-03-14

Book Description

The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.

In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching—the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.

"Brilliant.... A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy."—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Customer Reviews:

The pangs of independence.......2006-11-05

One of Elizabeth Bowen's finest novels, THE LAST SEPTEMBER has grown in popularity in recent years thanks to the overtly political nature of its topic (the demise of the Anglo-Irish "county" life by means of the Irish War of Independence) and the recent 1999 film adaptation with Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw. Most of the novel's action takes place in Danielstown, the Leinster country manor of Sir Richard and Myra Naylor and their wards Lois and Laurence. At the summer season, the estate plays host to all manner of guests, including the ill-matched and unhappy Montmorencys, the highly independent Marda Nolan, and some of the local garrisoned British officers and their wives whom Lois has befriended. As they play tennis and devour raspberries, their discussion is turned primarily towards gossip and flirtation--not to the escalating violence that surrounds and dooms their isled privilege.

Like most of Bowen's earlier fiction, THE LAST SEPTEMBER is difficult reading and demands close attention: the Naylors and their set rarely say either to themselves or to one another clearly what they mean, and express themselves via euphemism, overexaggeration, understatement, and/or indirection. Only when the change of independence, either sexual or political, threatens does language become more direct and urgent: this is one of the great themes of this important modern novel. Although its outcome is tragic, the book is ultimately quite funny (as are all of Bowen's novels), and its peculiar tension between these two modes captures well the odd tensions of the cloistered and privileged world of the Anglo-Irish.

"The façade of the house was like cardboard, without weight".......2005-09-19

Danielstown, the Irish estate belonging to Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, is the closed environment which allows Elizabeth Bowen to explore the Anglo-Irish lifestyle, values, and allegiances in 1921, a time when The Troubles are about to sweep the country and change it forever. The Naylors' niece Lois is nineteen, a bored young woman without goals, impatient to get on with the job of finding a husband so that she can fulfill her apparent destiny. Her cousin Laurence, an Oxford student who would rather be in Italy or France, also has little to do, a condition he shares with a married couple, Francie and Hugo Montmorency, who visit friends like the Naylors regularly, having no home of their own.

A British army unit is garrisoned nearby to protect their loyal subjects-and, not incidentally, provide a ready source of young men for garden parties and tennis matches. With an acute eye for detail, ironic detachment, and a sometimes caustic wit, Bowen reconstructs the lives of these aristocrats. One comments that it would be "the greatest pity if we were to become a republic and all these lovely troops taken away." Laurence remarks cynically that he would like to be present when "this house burns and we should all be so careful not to notice."

Throughout the novel, Bowen's prose remains formal and detached. When Lois and a young soldier begin to think they are in love, there are no passionate scenes--both are a product of their time and upbringing, and kisses are reserved for the engagement. When nearby estates are attacked, the Naylors simply change their schedules and limit their travel. Bowen's book has the ring of truth--she herself was part of the Ango-Irish tradition in County Cork, and she wrote the book in 1929, when the revolution was still fresh. Though she puts an iconoclastic spin on attitudes and values, she offers no apologies, preferring to present the facts, create the scenes, and allow the reader to judge for himself/herself whether Ireland was better off before or after The Troubles. Mary Whipple

The end of an era.......2005-08-27

An account of coming-of-age on a great estate in Ireland just before independence. Totally brilliant (though often knowingly vapid) as a portrait of upper-class life, with its tennis parties, discreet servants, and do-nothing guests. The "Troubles" remain mostly in the background, though they are not forgotten. The writing is evocative and perceptive ("The ladies were in the drawing-room laughing intimately, putting across the open door a barrier of exclusion") though at times rather overwrought in a Hopkinslike manner. Unfortunately, Bowen's stylistic self-consiousness rather veils the all-too-real tragedy taking place in and around her young heroine, but it is there all the same.

The Aching Self.......2004-01-28

Elizabeth Bowen's _The Last September_ is really a novel about internal self-talk and how that internal dialogue with the self is full of unarticulated desires, willful self-deceptions, and social anxieties of all sorts. Bowen has an incredibly penetrating knowledge of how people try to flatter themselves, read the world as revolving around themselves, and focus intently on an inner life that is completely wrong in many of its assumptions about what others think and feel. The way that ideology blinds people to reality of life and other's feelings is a continual subtle conflict running throughout the novel: two main ideological struggles occur. First, there is a constant tension between what "society" wants women to be and the reality of being a woman. There is a strong lesbian subtext in the novel although it is seems that the heroine has no conception of lesbianism or that frustrated lesbianism could be a reason for her problems in life. Yet at times the heroine makes such grossly inappropriate--yet spontaneous or seemingly irrelevant--remarks for a heterosexual woman that it is debatable if we are to see her as truly unaware of the potential for lesbian love. At any rate, the novel is so full of obsessive concern with gossip and what will people think of this or that to be blind to such desire seems absolutely mandatory.

Blindness is a major metaphor in the novel, one that Bowen specifically relates to the political situation in Ireland in 1918. The second major conflict in the novel is that between the Anglo-Irish and the English--despite the conflict between the pro-republic Irish and the English that is part of the plot. The real focus of the book is on the plight of these Anglo-Irish who feel such a huge gap between their worldview and that of the English. The English people's absolute failure to see this gap and assumption that of course these Anglo-Irish value all that is English and desire that is a major theme.

This book is achingly realistic in its depiction of the self-doubts that erode the joy of life with anxieties and confusion and its clear depiction of how the really important "rules of society" are the unwritten ones that determine who is able to communicate and share feelings and who is left feeling "unreal" and lonely. Ultimately the book is about the difficulty of finding happiness when people cannot understand themselves, their mental needs or desires, or the very different needs and desires of others. Bowen's best passages (to some they will be funny, to others heartbreaking) are the conversations between characters that are complete failures of communication. Bowen gives us glimpses of the self-talk of the characters and reveals their complete misunderstandings as well as their few powerful insights into each other's natures. The fate of the Anglo-Irish living in 1819 in today's Irish Republic is the most direct illustration of the theme of how difficult it is to communicate and find happiness, but I would argue it is meant to be symbolic of larger social problems that do not get enacted in violence.

"The façade of the house was like cardboard, without weight".......2003-12-12

A British army unit is garrisoned nearby to protect their loyal subjects-and, not incidentally, provide a ready source of young men for garden parties and tennis matches. With an acute eye for detail, ironic detachment, and a sometimes caustic wit, Bowen reconstructs the lives of these aristocrats. One comments that it would be "the greatest pity if we were to become a republic and all these lovely troops taken away." Laurence remarks cynically that he would like to be present when "this house burns and we should all be so careful not to notice." When an informer tells the family that guns have been buried on their property, they are blasé about it-they don't want to tell the soldiers because it might result in the trampling of some new trees.

Throughout the novel, Bowen's prose remains formal and detached. When Lois and a young soldier begin to think they are in love, there are no passionate scenes-both are a product of their time and upbringing, and kisses are reserved for the engagement. When nearby estates are attacked, the Naylors simply change their schedules and limit their travel. Bowen's book has the ring of truth-she herself was part of the Ango-Irish tradition in County Cork, and she wrote the book in 1929, when the revolution was still fresh. Though she puts an iconoclastic spin on attitudes and values, she offers no apologies, preferring to present the facts, create the scenes, and allow the reader to judge for himself/herself whether Ireland was better off before or after The Troubles. Mary Whipple

Average customer rating:

What a Terrific Book

A World of Love
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1400031052
Release Date: 2003-08-12

Book Description

In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth.

In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.

Customer Reviews:

What a Terrific Book.......2004-03-14

What a terrific book. Not quite as good as the better-known 'The Death of the Heart', but well worth reading.

There are two aspects to Bowen's work which attract me. First, her language. On almost every page there is something to leave one breathless. Here's a sample:

Their tide had turned and was racing in again: here was the universe filling up -- all there had been to be, do, know, dare, live for or die for at the full came flooding to this doorstep.

That's writing of the highest sort.

Also, unlike many second-rate writers, her novels center around the relationships between the characters, not only what type of people they are, but how they know each other and how they are related. One feels they are real people, not just devices to fill up space in the plot as dictated by the author, and as with real people, things are rarely nice and tidy, and feelings get hurt. This gives her work a third dimension which is crucial to the unfolding of her novels.

Average customer rating:

Intriguing but difficult

Style and secrets

Lovely cover, dull story

Private hazards of war

An Excellent Writer With A Plot That Plods!

The Heat of the Day
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0385721285
Release Date: 2002-07-09

Book Description

In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.

Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay. But for her, the sense of impending catastrophe becomes acutely personal when she discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling secrets to the enemy, and that the man who is following him wants Stella herself as the price of his silence. Caught between these two men, not sure whom to believe, Stella finds her world crumbling as she learns how little we can truly know of those around us.

Customer Reviews:

Intriguing but difficult.......2007-05-22

Elizabeth Bowen was new to me, but as she appears in "1001 Books To Read Before You Die" several times, I gave it a try. "Heat of the Day" is far from a conventional novel; it is circumspect, indirect and suggestive rather than bold. The story takes place in war time London, where the usual constraints of propriety have loosened. Stella and her lover Robert exist in a vacuum; important wartime jobs are hinted at but never revealed. Stella is approached by the mysterious Harrison, who tells her Robert is a spy. If she tells this to Robert, Harrison warns, his behavior will change, which will immediately confirm the truth of what Harrison is saying. The price for Robert's safety is Stella herself, but we don't really know how Harrison knows her or why he has fallen in love with her. It's a trap, and secretely Stella must suspect there's something to what Harrison says, because she doesn't reveal the secret to Robert, but tries to hold off Harrison for several months. Faced with the truth, however, Stella gives in, only for Harrison to discover that he hasn't gotten what he wants anyway.

Wartime London is portrayed in a dreamy surreal way, most notably through Louie, the not-too-bright wife of a soldier. Adrift in a transitory world, where men come and go on their way to war, she accidently intrudes on Stella and Harrison in their ultimate confrontation, and her inability to understand what is happening almost mirrors the reader's own puzzlement. It's really through Louie that we get the greatest sense of how very unreal life was in London in those dark days.

Bowen's style is difficult, and if you're looking for plot, look elsewhere. Bowen's genteel upper classes, the Stellas, the Roberts and his family, are under siege, from the Harrisons and Louies of the world as much as from the war. Ironically, Louie is the real survivor. This isn't an easy read, but Bowen is a master at suggesting atmosphere, mystery, and even menace in a very subtle way.

Style and secrets.......2007-04-22

"Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf." The ATLANTIC MONTHLY comment printed on the cover sums the novel up perfectly. The Woolf element is the sensitive study of personality, especially that of Stella Rodney, a fortyish divorcée living in London at the time of the Blitz. Greene could well have provided the character of the sinister Harrison, who intrudes into Stella's life with the suggestion that her lover, Robert Kelway, might be a spy. But the two elements do not easily coexist. The psychological concerns hold up the story, which proceeds in episodes rather than linearly; its beginning is implausible in terms of narrative, and its ending in terms of character. But Bowen does look quite deeply into the bonds between friends, families, and lovers, and the many secrets we keep from one another and even from ourselves.

Let me amplify this with a few specifics. If rating my immediate enjoyment of this particular book, I would have given it three stars rather than four, but I find it growing on me as I write. I have certainly admired the other three Bowens that I have read (THE LAST SEPTEMBER, THE HOUSE IN PARIS, and THE DEATH OF THE HEART), all of which feature much younger protagonists. She is a polished stylist, and her powers of description are extraordinary, as for instance in setting the stage for the late-summer open-air concert which opens this novel. She can also come up with striking stage-directions such as: "Tearless, she made a wailing movement of the arms above her head." In terms of the emotional content of the larger scene, this is unexpected but perfect. Or take the sentence with which the chapter [15] virtually opens: "Not a sign, not a sound, not a movement from where she at a distance from him lay, exhausted by having given birth to the question." Reread, pondered, and read again, this too is perfect; the narrative indirection and the combination of distance with closeness are the entire point of the episode -- but it is annoying that you have first to get through the artifice of the inversion of "at a distance from him lay" and to figure out what the question must have been that she asked. I suspect that this novel would continue to reveal riches on rereading, and so am glad to give Bowen the benefit of the doubt. But I fear that the ATLANTIC review may ultimately do her a disservice, and her choice of the Greene-like theme encourages a kind of first reading very different from what the author does best.

Lovely cover, dull story.......2004-01-30

I consider myself a reader of some discernment, but this book was among the most difficult to enjoy or to offer any reason to go beyond the 160 pages that I managed to muddle through.

First, it seemed very dated and the pages and pages of descriptions of minutiae broken up by dialogue every ten pages or so, it seemed, were real barriers to getting an understanding of the book. Also, the characters were so bloodless and chilly and the tone so remote that it was impossible to identify with or like these characters. When I arrived at page 160 and Louie was mentioned, a scramble ensued to figure out who the heck she was.

We read this for our book club. We have four English teachers in the group, several librarians and other educated people and to a person, we loathed this book. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone and can't see why it deserved renewed attention all these many years later.

Private hazards of war.......2003-11-18

One sign of a good book is that it continues to pursue you after you have read the last page and put it down. First of all, I liked the switches of scene from war-torn London to the tranquil but disheartened countryside. We are reminded of the constraints of the blackout, ridiculous absence of identifying place-names on train journeys, confusing to friend and foe alike, and the changing progress and evolution of the war as the years go by. There is a difference between country life in England (Robert's family rattling around in a Victorian hulk they cannot decide what they want to do with), and in neutral Ireland (Roderick's inheritance, Mount Morris, where basic items are in short supply but there will be a sound future for it after the war). It is the story of a woman's gradual acceptance and understanding of an intolerable, heart-breaking situation, and there are some extraordinary vivid scenes that stay with you. The first chapter introduces us to the villain, Harrison, lost in thought while listening to the band in the park; it is not clear why he is so self-absorbed, or why is he so rude to the young woman in the next seat who is only striking up a casual conversation. The second chapter introduces the heroine and sets out the complexities of her ensuing dilemma and Harrison's place in it.

This Harrison is a bit of a riddle and it's hard to be convinced by his sudden obsession with Stella without finding him somewhat abnormal. His scenes with Stella are understated and only when you mull them over do you realize how terrible they are, how shocking are the points he is making, the game he is playing. Before we have met Robert we have no way to assess Stella's reaction; is she going to be persuaded to casually drop him and take up with Harrison? How deep does their relationship go?

Soon we find out that their relationship is central, that they are everything to each other, so profoundly attuned that they share each other's thoughts. Stella's relationship with her son Roderick is also superbly drawn; his masterful taking over of his Irish inheritance makes his army life seem juvenile and irrelevant; Mount Morris gives his life meaning. In contrast to these three central figures we have the complex orneriness of Harrison, turning up again and again and always introducing some unbearable tension, and Robert's powerful mother and sister, full of incoherent fuss, on whom Stella will "make no impression whatsoever," as Robert predicts. The characters are wonderfully interesting and individual. There is another important scene at the funeral of Cousin Francis where Stella meets Harrison for the first time and learns to everyone's surprise that Roderick is Francis' heir. Her late husband's family keep her at an icy distance.

Two women living in the same apartment building make friends, share each other's woes and their lives lightly brush Stella's. They introduce a lighter note, or at least diffuse tension from the main protagonists, coming from another social stratum in the city in wartime.

What would lead a highly intelligent, educated, privileged man to become a traitor to his country? Climactic is the explanation Robert gives for his support of the other side, born of his disillusion with Dunkirk and need to envision a meaningful future at the end of the war. Does Stella accept it? The final chapter, like the first, shows us Louie, the aimless, artless girl at the band-stand, now at the end of the war having lost her husband but gained a child of her own, returning to live in the ravaged seaside town where she spent her childhood.

An Excellent Writer With A Plot That Plods!.......2003-08-28

"Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolfe." When I read this Atlantic Monthly blurb on Elizabeth Bowen's "The Heat Of The Day," I thought, this is a book for me. It took me 200 pages before I became involved in the novel. I did not put it down earlier, because I must admit, objectively, that Elizabeth Bowen's writing style is elegant, and at times poetic. I was curious to learn what she wanted to say through the novel's characters and plot. However she does take forever to say something. Her dialogue is often inane, and her unnecessary descriptions slow the storyline unbearably. I am not a reader who requires a book to be plot driven, but Ms. Bowen's meanderings are excessive.

One of the book's reviewers, V.S. Pritchett, writes, "Out of the plainest things - the drawing of a curtain - she can make something electric and urgent." I beg to disagree with Mr. Pritchett, but there is absolutely nothing electric, in this case, about a full page description of a woman drawing the curtains and looking out the window. It is downright tedious. After a long, rather innocuous conversation with her son, our heroine Stella Rodney, puts her cigarette out in the ashtray. After a pause, her son says, "I suppose you'll need the wastebasket." That was the conversation's high point.

The story takes us to wartorn London, about midway through WWII. Stella Rodney, an attractive, intelligent woman in her 40s, is divorced with a son in the Army. Ms. Bowen portrays the tension and eeriness of a city, and its inhabitants, stressed by years of war and bombardment. Stella keeps running into a strange man, Harrison, who first introduces himself to her at her cousin's funeral. The meeting is not accidental. Apparently Harrison is working for one of England's secret services. He informs her that her lover, Robert, is an enemy spy. Harrison wants her to stop seeing Robert, and begin a relationship with him. He has fallen in love with her, somewhat quickly, and based on very little time together. I would call him obsessed, in a low-keyed manner. Stella's willingness to begin an affair with Harrison, is the price she will have to pay for protecting the man she loves from arrest. During the ensuing months, while she ponders and processes this information, she spends time with her son, goes with Robert to visit his family in their country estate, and makes a trip to Ireland to see about her son's inheritance. I suppose it is not the outcome of Stella's decision that is important, but her thoughts and feelings along the way.

Book Description

A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her late husband's sister, Emmeline. Drawn to each other in the wake of their loss, the two set up house together and gradually become more entwined than they know.

But the comfortable refuge they have made is "a house built on sand"; both realize it cannot last. While Cecilia, capricious and unsure if she can really love anyone, moves reluctantly toward a second marriage, Emmeline, a gentle and independent soul, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed for the first time by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Bowen’s psychological acuity is on full display in a conclusion that plumbs the depths of this seemingly detached young woman in a single, life-shattering moment.

Customer Reviews:

The edited life.......2006-10-24

TO THE NORTH was one of the most praised of Elizabeth Bowen's novels during her lifetime, but it is less well known today than her other mature works THE DEATH OF THE HEART or THE HOUSE IN PARIS, in part because it is perhaps a more difficult read than either of those two of her masterworks. As with all of Bowen's novels, it is primarily concerned with what Bowen calls in THE DEATH OF THE HEART "the edited life," the life of the upper middle class who refuse to speak of how they truly feel or what they truly want with one another. In TO THE NORTH, Bowen herself emphasizes this sense of preterition by herself refusing to tell her readers what her characters are feeling; since they themselves often speak around what they want or say the opposite, we must intuit from the whole of their actions what they truly mean. Hers is a world, she suggests, where all readers are naive interpreters, like the innocent teenager Pauline in this novel (one of Bowen's many Jamesian ingenues) who rarely understands how the adults around her are always at cross-purposes with her and one another; the best readings we can do then are always re-readings.

The glittering social world of this novel, coupled with its stylistic flourishes and sometimes absurd characters make the novel at times seem almost as akin to Firbank or to Waugh as to Henry James, Bowen's usual point of comparison; certainly one of its heroines, Cecilia, could easily stand among Waugh's coterie of Bright Young Things. Cecilia lives in St. John's Wood with her dead husband's sister Emmeline; although the women rarely spend time with one another, they come to love each other in ways they cannot even articulate. Cecilia is courted by Julian, Pauline's uncle, while the more placid and unworldly Emmeline embarks on a secret affair with Markie, a young rotter who has also flirted with Cecilia; their entanglements play out statically in the sparkling if inhuman comic world of weekend visits to country houses and crowded London cocktail parties. But in her brief experiences of travel and speed--in an airplane or in a car--Emmeline finds her heart and her secret affair quickening. These episodes, which provide Bowen with her most virtuoso episodes in the novel, suggest how the unavoidable encounter modernity has forever changed the traditional world of the novel of manners in the twentieth century, and hurl Bowen's novel towards its unforgettable violent conclusion. It's a tough novel, but it is more than worth the effort.

An absolute must.......2001-01-04

This finely wrought book is moving, believable and deep-probing. Its amazingly sharp insight goes hand in hand with a command of language that reminds the reader of Forster.

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Anti Nostolgic Reaquaintence

The Little Girls
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Friendship | Women's Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1400034795
Release Date: 2004-07-13

Book Description

In 1914, three eleven-year-old girls buried a box in a thicket on the coast of England, shortly before World War I sent their lives on divergent paths. Nearly fifty years later, a series of mysteriously-worded classified ads brings the women reluctantly together again. Dinah has grown from a chubby, bossy girl to a beautiful, eccentric widow. The clever, reticent Clare has blossomed into an imperious entrepreneur of independent means. And Sheila—who was once the pretty princess of her small universe—has weathered disappointed aspirations to become a chic and glossily correct housewife.

As these radically different women confront one another and their shared secrets, the hard-won complacencies of their present selves are irrevocably shattered. In a novel as subtle and compelling as a mystery, Elizabeth Bowen explores the buried revelations—and the dangers—that attend the summoning up of childhood and the long-concealed scars of the past.

Customer Reviews:

Anti Nostolgic Reaquaintence.......2006-09-26

Elizabeth Bowen became one of my favorite authors ever within the first chapter of the first book of hers that I read, (The House in Paris). Her text is acute and moving, it makes everyone alive and has a tangible respect of the subjectivity of people's existence.

The Little Girls, the fourth novel of hers I have read. I do not think I would have fallen as madly in love with her if it had been my first or second book of hers that I read. But it is still a good novel. Like most of Bowen' work plot is secondary to the way people read one another. In this case the three girls of the title, who are all grown up and in their sixties. They have not spoken to each other since their childhood effectively ended with the outbreak of the First World War. The girls put together a pagan sort of made up ritual in creating a time capsule to go along with their exotic nick-names, (Sheickie, Mumbo and Dicey). Then fifty years later they decide to search for it. But really it is about

After reflection the prose of this seems different than in her earlier novels. I read an article that stated in her later novels, especially Eva Trout, her prose tends to be more in the subjectivity of the characters. The Little Girls is definitely moving in that direction. The third person narrator is using the vocabulary of whom she is describing. This is especially obvious in the second section narrating the events that happened immediately before the outbreak of the war. It makes it less sympathetic than the prose of her earlier novels. I guess I just wanted to like it more than I did.

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Average customer rating:

have a glass of sherry, come rest in the lounge

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 1400096561
Release Date: 2006-08-08

Book Description

Widely known for her much-admired novels, including The Heat of the Day, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century's writers equally through her short fiction.

This collection brings together seventy-nine magnificent stories written over the course of four decades. Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely obcerved children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen's reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives—rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft—transcend their time and place.

Customer Reviews:

have a glass of sherry, come rest in the lounge.......2001-04-28

elizabeth bowen's stories are well crafted. reading them (for me... i was born in 1974) is like peeking into the drawing room of a time long gone and now crystallised on the page. i gave the book 4 stars instead of five, because while some of the stories are real gems, others fell flat to me. this was my first experience with her work, and 760 odd pages of short stories was a lot of stories!

i would recommend, unless you just want to read a few stories at a time, (the book is broken up into decades and then pre and post war sections)or you are already a huge fan, to start out with a smaller collection of her work. then again, why not pay a few extra dollars and get them all at once?

i escpecially recommend the stories of the twenties and thirties, they really are delightful... the ghosts and murderessess inhabiting some of them are intriguing, there's a flavour to her work you simply don't find in newer fiction. reading her work was like entering another time zone, quite interesting stuff!

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The SECOND Ghost Book
Lady Cynthia Asquith , and Elizabeth Bowen
Manufacturer: Pan Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0330021648

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