Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel

Book excerpt: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel argues that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) is one of the most important, though undervalued, practitioners of the twentieth-century novel in English. This is an innovative study with significant implications for contemporary critical and theoretical writing. The authors contend that Bowen's work calls for a radically new conception of criticism and theory - and of the novel itself. Bowen's ten novels have been viewed as 'society' novels, novels of 'manners', modelled on - but inferior to - the writings of Henry James, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. But the fundamental strangeness of Bowen's novels has gone largely unacknowledged.