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Collected Stories by Elizabeth Bowen review – ghosts, comedy and a touch of Spark

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/14/collected-stories-elizabeth-bowen-review

Bowen’s short stories from the 1920s to the 40s shimmer with a world just out of reach

In his introduction to this new collected edition of her stories, John Banville argues that Elizabeth Bowen, best remembered for her novels such as The Last September, was “the supreme genius of her time” in the short form. That seems a bold claim, though “her time” was a pretty narrow window. Most of the 79 stories here were written between the mid-1920s and the end of the second world war. Although Bowen lived another 30 years, she had less need of the ready income that stories provided after the commercial success of her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart.

That Bowen, born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, wrote for money may seem surprising; there’s nothing dashed off here. The earliest stories, written in Bowen’s early 20s, are crystalline miniatures of half a dozen pages or so, centring on moments of social unease: the exquisite embarrassments of Breakfast; a teacher calling on her pupils to assuage her loneliness in Daffodils. Her characters are, as one puts it, like “some tortured insect twirling on a pin”.

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