A New Author to me - Elizabeth Bowen

Some time ago I finished The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. I had picked this up at a book cute gift shop in Galway, Ireland, without knowing anything about it or the author, other than she was a female Irish writer born at the turn of the century. While planning our visit to Ireland, I noted that most of the notable writers of the Irish renaissance who came of age around the Easter Rising of 1916 and the World Wars were male, and I don't think I read any female writers in my Irish literature class in college (although I could be forgetting someone).  A little research on Wikipedia reveals Bowen was quite different from the group of male writers who were motivated by a desire for an Irish national identity. She was a member of a well to do Anglo-Irish family, and moved to England with her mother after her father had a nervous breakdown according to other sites when she was around 7. Her mother died when she was thirteen, so she was raised by aunts. In England, she went to art school and married, and eventually became acquainted with the Bloomsbury group. Wikipedia notes a number of affairs she had but calls her marriage "contented." After her husband retired, they moved back to her ancestral home, Bowen's Court, in County Cork, where she hosted other members of the Bloomsbury group. Her husband died shortly thereafter, and she continued to write, but had to sell the house because she ran out of money. Before her death in 1973, she had written about 10 novels and a number of short stories, and apparently was admired for her ghost stories.

Does she have a faithful group of readers in Great Britain?  I found an article that called her one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. But I also found different citations for her age when she moved to England (6, or 7). One of her books (The Heat of the Day) is ranked number 69 on The Guardians list of 100 best novels, so maybe I just haven't paid attention to her name, or perhaps because other novelists of her period outshine her, she doesn't make it to the top of many TBR lists.  A review of a Bowen biography by Neil Corcoran from The New York Times, starts with the caveat that most articles about Elizabeth Bowen begin with "little read" or "unappreciated," but is effusive with praise for her observations. She may be an author who is poised for rediscovery because of an interest in women writers and the popularity of the Bloomsbury Group in particular, but she may be an author who fades into obscurity because her novels have little plot combined with highly literary writing and subtle emotional content.

Based on my feelings toward The Death of the Heart, I am curious to read more of her novels, but not anxious or highly motivated to read more. This was her first published novel. The plot is basically this: a young teen, Portia, is orphaned and goes to live with  her half brother Thomas and his wife Anna. Thomas and Portia's father had left Thomas's mother to be with Portia's mother, so theirs is a complicated relationship, but sympathetic. I almost wish there were more of this. Anna and Thomas have a childless relationship, and were married after Anna had broken off a temptuous affair, so their marriage is complex, but not unsympathetic.  Portia has a flirtatious affair with a young man who is a devotee of her sister-in-law, is sent away to stay with her SIL's old governess at the ocean, and then comes back feeling betrayed and unloved and throws herself at a kindly older gentleman who is a pitied friend of the old lover of the sister-in-law.

Bowen has been compared to Henry James and it is easy to see why. There is not a lot of action and the emotions are all slightly suppressed. But her writing feels luxurious, rich in word choice and metaphors and other literary devices. Her themes of displacement and loss of innocence are perennial favorites of mine with my obsession over the uprooted nature of our family's life.

In The Death of the Heart, we see the contrast between the young, idealistic, emotional Portia and the complacent, anxious, unhappy couple. I'm not certain whether to see Tom and Anna's marriage as a compromise that works or feel sorry for them. Portia, too, is both sympathetic and pitiable. She has the rashness of a young teen and more emotional attachments to the people she meets. But she becomes irrationally upset when she discovers Anna has read her diary.  She is blind to Eddie's instability and desparate for attention and affection.

My favorite part of the book was about her stay at the seashore with the family of Anna's governess. There Portia comes to life, and the whole book seems livelier with more animated characters and more actions and events. Of course, Eddie acts abominably and Portia discovers other young men might admire her. She seems more comfortable at the seaside home of a working class family than in the townhome of her wealthier relatives, even though she is a border. The whole tone of this middle section of the book is lighter and livelier than the beginning and end which are dark and focused on indecisiveness about how to act and feel.

SPOILER ALERT

Another article notes that the titles of the sections of the book refer to parts of the rite of Baptism in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil."  I disagree in the interpretation that this site gives of the ending - that Anna learns to handle Portia more carefully. It ends on a complicated note. Anna fails to retrieve Portia after they learn that she has run to the apartment of their old single male friend, who has been like a kindly uncle to Portia. She has just been rejected by Eddie and then by this guy, and in her loneliness, she is retrieved by the maid who once was her confidant but now has been alienated after the diary incident.  The book is a meditation on how childhood innocence is lost by initiation into the world of adults.  Portia has encountered the world (wealthy society is not so happy and carefree as it seems to those outside of it), the flesh (love is not so happy and carefree as it seems ...), and now the devil appears to be the inability of those closest to you to love you the way you need to be loved.  Only those who mean something to us and can hurt someone so deeply. It is a melancholic ending to a melancholic book, but one that was written so well that I kept reading. It is also set in a period just before WWII that is fascinating for all the changes about to take place. It was not the book I expected, but one that provided an excuse for research and meditation.