‘There is much in these stories that the mind shrinks from’, John Banville remarked in The New York Review of Books in October 2019, as he sought to identify recurring tropes in Elizabeth Bowen’s short fiction while striving to make sense of the older writer’s style, technique, and literary practice. ‘Something is always lurking beneath the exquisitely limned surface of Bowen’s fictional world.’¹ Banville’s comments speak to a key component in Bowen’s aesthetic and to a guiding principle in her use of the short story form. An enthusiastic champion of the form, Bowen produced seven volumes of short fiction over a forty-year period, beginning with her debut book, Encounters (1923), and running through to the retrospective A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965). In addition, she edited several short story anthologies, produced forewords to collections of stories by some of her predecessors and contemporaries, gave seminars and radio broadcasts on the short story, and wrote a clutch of essays in which she explored what she thought were the defining features of the genre. Throughout that work, as Allan Hepburn has shown, Bowen’s interventions were purposeful and consistent.²

In essence, Bowen believed that the structural economy of the form meant that short stories are defined by obliquity and concision, and that these features distinguish stories from longer types of fiction, such as the novel. ‘The short story is at an advantage over the novel’, she explained in a preface to an American selection of her stories in 1959, ‘and can claim a nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighted down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis’ (A 77–8). In many respects, this statement distils Bowen’s thinking on the subject; the analogical connection to poetry and the generic distinction with the novel serve as mainstays in many of her commentaries on the short story. Similarly, the restrictions that apply to the short story (manifest, most obviously, in its length) are often said to constitute a strength rather than a limitation. Such comments, in turn, have shaped the ways in which many readers have talked about Bowen’s work as a short story writer, with Banville typical in his suggestion that ‘[the] sense of things hiding behind other things is one of the most abiding leitmotifs in all her stories’.³

A few weeks after its publication in The New York Review of Books, Banville’s essay reappeared in a slightly revised format in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Banville deleted his reference to what ‘the mind shrinks from’ in the latter text, and revised one of his sentences to read: ‘Something is always lurking behind the exquisitely limned surface of Bowen’s fictional world.’⁴ The preposition ‘beneath’, as in a pond, consequently became ‘behind’, as in an arras. It was not the only time these comments were recycled in the closing months of 2019, with the same argument featuring in his introduction to a new edition of Bowen’s Collected Stories which was published in Knopf’s Everyman’s Library series. For the most part, this collection was a simple repackaging of an earlier edition of Bowen’s stories, likewise called Collected Stories (1980), edited by Angus Wilson, in which the same seventy-nine stories were placed in the same order and divided into the same categories: ‘First Stories’, ‘The Twenties’, ‘The Thirties’, ‘The War Years’, ‘Post-War Stories’. Banville’s proposition that ‘There is much in these stories that the mind shrinks from’ was repeated in his introduction to this not-so-new collection, and the word ‘beneath’ (from The Daily Telegraph) was chosen instead of ‘behind’ (from The New York Review of Books) when Banville spoke of traces of things that are hidden from Bowen’s readers.⁵ Such tweaks can easily go unnoticed, and discussion of their import can be dismissed as pedantic or abstruse. Finicking of this sort, however, illustrates the unease that is generated by the idiosyncrasies of Bowen’s writing: readers often find themselves unsettled by what they have read, and critics are left uncertain as to whether the strangeness of her stories stems from something beneath, behind, within, or beyond the parameters of her tales.

Tessa Hadley picked up on some of these points in a review of the Knopf edition of the Collected Stories for the London Review of Books in 2020. Thinking back to her earliest encounters with Bowen as a young reader in the late 1960s, and her shock on realising that crucial bits of information had been withheld, Hadley remembered struggling to participate in a form of reading in which signification was understood as an opening out rather than a shutting down of narrative possibility. For Hadley, this was as much a consequence of Bowen’s style as it was a result of her withholding content and textual detail. ‘There was something so spiky in her sentences’, Hadley clarified, and this spikiness was – and still is – conveyed through Bowen’s proclivity for distorting the conventions of grammar and her fondness for peripeteia, unexpected twists, and unusual syntactical arrangements. ‘What was unobvious in Bowen’s prose held out a promise, even as it frustrated my efforts at comprehension: it seemed to say that nothing was, after all, obvious – everything was interesting, because complicated.’⁶ Many other readers have similarly attested to this roughening of meaning, and to the ways in which habitual patterns of interpretation are interfered with or deferred in Bowen’s fiction. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle link ‘the strangeness and disturbing power of Bowen’s writing’ to its ‘formal and linguistic instability’, while Maud Ellmann notes the readerly opportunities that arise from ‘the oddities of [Bowen’s] unnerving syntax’.⁷ Meanwhile, Susan Osborn judiciously observes that ‘Bowen’s fictional narratives are written in a queer, opaque style that realizes itself not solely as a style to be looked through but as a style to be looked at as well.’⁸

Although Bowen’s seven volumes of short fiction were published across four decades, the vast majority of her stories date from the first twenty years or so of her career. By contrast, Bowen appears to have written only a handful of stories in the period after the publication of her penultimate volume, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945). Her elusive story of manipulation and sexual awakening, ‘A Day in the Dark’, is one of just four stories to feature in the ‘Post-War’ section of the Collected Stories, and it bears the date 1956. These stories, together with the anecdote of deception and intrigue ‘The Dolt’s Tale’ (1944), were also the only new stories to appear in the twenty-strong A Day in the Dark, with the remaining fifteen stories previously published in five of her six other books of short fiction. For no discernible reason, no stories were selected from Bowen’s second volume, Ann Lee’s and Other Stories (1926). A Day in the Dark began with a short preface, in which Bowen admits that many of her stories ‘terminate with a query’. She concedes that this technique creates ambiguity:

The earliest of Bowen’s four ‘Post-War’ stories, ‘I Hear You Say So’ (1945), turns upon such uncertainty. It draws readers into the company of an ensemble of traumatised Londoners, each of whom is trying to adjust to changes shortly after the end of the Second World War. One of those characters is a sleepwalker named Ursula, whose husband was killed in the war, and who is suddenly awakened by the sound of a nightingale’s song. ‘Disjected lines of poetry, invocations, came flooding into her mind’, Bowen writes. ‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet. She looked down at the carpet, wondering if a secret were in its pattern. Naturally, it was too dark to see’ (CS 757).

If a pattern, or a secret, awaits discovery, this is not disclosed to Ursula. Nor is it apparent to the other characters in ‘I Hear You Say So’. Nor, indeed, is it made known to readers of this strangely somnolent tale. Similarly, it is unclear whether the italicised quotation from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ carries any significance for the young widow, or whether John Keats’s poem contains any clues about how to decode this story, beyond the fact that it, too, was occasioned by the appearance of such a bird, and that it also engages with issues of mortality and solitude. Ursula is one of several people in the story who attempt to ascribe meaning to the nightingale’s song when it is heard a few days after VE Day. ‘Apart from anything, it’s too soon. Much too soon, after a war like this’ (CS 755), states another woman, Naomi, who fears to believe in the possibility of peace. Naomi interprets the birdsong as a tempting of fate rather than a harbinger of hope: ‘Even Victory’s nearly been too much. There ought not to have been a nightingale in the same week. The important thing is that people should go carefully. They’d much better not feel at all till they feel normal. The first thing must be, to get everything organized’ (CS 755). Anxieties course through ‘I Hear You Say So’, and they find expression in Bowen’s stylistic choices as well as in her characters’ attitudes, mannerisms, and turns of phrase. This anxiety is encapsulated in Naomi’s clipped sentences, her reiterative use of the adverb ‘too’, and her stress on the need for normality – delivered, the reader is tellingly informed, in ‘her firmest voice’ (CS 755). It is also evident in Bowen’s inclusion of an unnecessarily interruptive comma (after ‘must be’), and her decision to insert this hesitant punctuation mark immediately before Naomi talks of the need ‘to get everything organized’.

Fears of chaos and of what has survived the uncertainties of war also feature in another of Bowen’s ‘Post-War’ stories, ‘Gone Away’ (1946). Another sleepy figure, a man with the knowing name of ‘Van Winkle’, returns to the ‘realized ideal’ of his picture-book English village, only to discover that everything that seems familiar ‘was in fact a set-up’ (CS 759). In this uncanny world, solid buildings have become two-dimensional props, ‘façades only, supported by struts behind’ (CS 759). An old friend is ‘under contract not to’ age (CS 758), and what was once commonplace has been rendered ersatz.

The fourth story in the ‘Post-War’ cluster, ‘Hand in Glove’ (1952), recalls another vanished world, as it depicts an Anglo-Ireland that was embedded in British imperialism. The Big House setting and the repeated references to the military are emblematic of this imperialist project, but so is the barely told backstory, which occurred at some point in colonial India during the latter half of the nineteenth century. That second story, lying somewhere beneath the narrative of ‘Hand in Glove’, provides the context for Bowen’s supernatural tale of possessions and possessiveness in the early years of the twentieth century. In this playful ghost story, which bears echoes of Rudyard Kipling and M. R. James, ‘a spirited pair’ (CS 767) of young women unearth more than they bargained for when they rifle through their aunt’s treasures only to discover an animate evening glove, which hails from the colonies and harbours malicious intentions. The oddness of the conceit of a murderous ‘elbow-length, magnolia-pure white glove’ (CS 775) is not commented upon in ‘Hand in Glove’, and Bowen’s portrayal of this enlivened formal garment owes as much to surrealist humour as it does to gothic melodrama. ‘It was a marvel that anything so dainty should be strong’, Bowen’s narrator wickedly suggests: ‘So great, so convulsive was the swell of the force that, during the strangling of Ethel, the seams of the glove split. In any case, the glove would have been too small for her’ (CS 775).

Dark humour can also be discerned in several of Bowen’s other supernatural tales, including ‘Pink May’ and ‘Green Holly’, which were both published in The Demon Lover. In the first of these stories, an unhappily married woman tries to rebuff her friend’s fears about being ‘frightened’ by a ghost by breezily claiming, ‘I was in such a hurry; there never was any time’ (CS 712; original emphasis). In the second, the conventions of the ghost story are fused with romantic comedy to describe sexual tensions among ‘a skeleton staff’ (CS 719) of intelligence operatives who are sequestered in a haunted house during the Second World War. Violence and humour are just about kept in check in ‘Green Holly’, where flirtations begin to develop between the living and the dead, played out against the backdrop of an annually re-enacted suicide. They also struggle to be held in balance in the title story of The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934), when a group of self-conscious, upper-class progressives assemble in a house whose ‘privacy … had been violated’ by a previous act of barbarity (CS 362). One of the guests, a nervous young woman named Muriel, regales the party with a gruesome account of the murder of the house’s former owner, Mrs Bentley. ‘No one would mind if it had been just a short sharp shooting. But it was so … prolonged. It went on all over the house’ (CS 364; original ellipsis), Muriel explains. She imagines the unfortunate Mrs Bentley attempting to flee her deranged husband, Harold, and points out to the rest of the group that ‘She couldn’t lock any doors – naturally’ (CS 367). Bowen’s punctuation of Muriel’s tale is carefully weighted. Expectant ellipses and em-dashes delay the awfulness of Mrs Bentley’s suffering and tease the reader with undisclosed details, all the while prolonging the narration just as Harold slowly dismembered his wife. (Her hands and feet, hacked off, are found scattered throughout the house.) In a gleefully visceral detail, Muriel claims that the Bentleys’ maid, who tried to come to her employer’s aid, leaves traces of blood everywhere in the house: ‘Everything she touched was … sticky’ (CS 367; original ellipsis).

Such moments serve as a reminder that Bowen was not only a brilliant – but could be a brilliantly disturbing – comic writer. ‘The Dancing-Mistress’, from Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929), is an early example, and depicts an exhausted teacher fantasising about killing a spectacularly talentless pupil during a dance class: ‘They looked hard at each other; all the rest waited. Margery thought, “She’d like to kill me”’ (CS 255). Margery seems to read Miss James’s mind, for she thinks, with deliberate irony, ‘“I would like to kill her – just once”’ (CS 255). Such interweaving of violence and humour is a recurring feature in many of Bowen’s stories, and often serves to wrongfoot as much as to relieve unsuspecting readers. The frequency with which it occurs in stories that turn upon adult–child encounters is noteworthy; so is the consistency with which it appears in stories that depict male–female situations of courtship or marriage. Time and again, these stories undo – or, at the very least, call into question – the conventions of romance fiction by thwarting expectations that are traditionally associated with the marriage plot. In this context, the strangulation of Ethel in ‘Hand in Glove’ takes on fresh meaning, since it is directly connected to her attempts to bag herself a rich husband. Likewise, the comic pastiche of ‘The Cat Jumps’ masks that story’s exploration of deep-seated desires and anxieties, even as it papers over the ‘outburst[s] of sex-antagonism’ (CS 365) that erupt among a group of seemingly sophisticated, rational people – people who like to pride themselves on having ‘light, bright, shadowless, thoroughly disinfected minds’ (CS 362).

The shortage of opportunities for characters, particularly female characters, to express themselves in ‘Green Holly’, similarly results in cyclical romantic relationships and a mirroring of the living and the dead. As Phyllis Lassner observes, this mirroring speaks to ‘the story’s primary concerns with the existential malaise submerged in romantic comedy and melodrama’, insofar as the characters – both living and dead – risk losing their sense of self through scripted roles and ‘self-eliminating’ fantasies.⁹ One of the ghosts is doomed to perform the part of femme fatale, for instance, complete with feather boa, and is heard worrying that ‘it was not merely a matter of, how was she? but of, was she – to-night – at all?’ (CS 723; original emphasis).

Such confusions of identity, and of the foundations upon which a self might be established, are further explored in texts that ‘complicat[e] the conventional scripts of monogamous romance’, and that ‘writ[e] desire as destabilizing and threatening to complacent notions of the orderly self’, as Patricia Coughlan states.¹⁰ For example, in ‘Pink May’, the unnamed protagonist recounts her attempts to escape matrimonial tedium by embarking on a passionate affair. The excitement that ensues coincides with the woman’s experience of being haunted by a presence that the protagonist casts in the role of ghostly prude or once jilted lover: ‘She was either a puritan, with some chip on her shoulder, or else she’d once taken a knock. I incline to that last idea – though I can’t say why’ (CS 716). That presence, however, is also a projection of a complex of internalised pressures, including social conformity, the protagonist’s fears for the consequences of her actions (she, in turn, will ‘take a knock’, and will find herself homeless), and aspects of an identity that have been both enforced and sublimated. As Bowen herself parenthetically remarks in her preface to the American edition of The Demon Lover – published in the USA in 1946 under the title Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories – the ghosts in several of her stories, including ‘Pink May’, are ‘questionable (for are they subjective purely?)’ (MT 98). As Bowen identifies in that preface, the title story in The Demon Lover is another example of this type of spectral fiction, with its representation of a middle-aged woman under stress, its breakdown of the structures of time and space, its alarming use of syntax, and its allusive intertwining of names – Mrs Drover, Kathleen, K.

‘The short story is a young art’, Bowen declares in her introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Stories (1937); ‘as we know it, it is the child of this century’ (CI 38). The contemporaneity of the form allows Bowen to argue that it is free from many of the conventions that tether more established literary modes – exposition, for instance, as well as unwieldy segues, and what she terms the ‘forced continuity’ of longer prose narratives (CI 38). With this freedom in mind, Bowen promotes an understanding of short fiction that foregrounds its episodic and oblique potential. Such freedom encourages her to conceptualise the short story in relation to other types of writing, particularly poetry and the novel. ‘Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential’ to the short story, she states, ‘that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose’ (CI 38). If such comments speak to the newness of the short form (or, rather, the newness of a particular type of short story), and if they are indicative of an attempt to place that form in a broader context, Bowen’s claims about poetry and the novel could equally be considered expressive of an underlying anxiety about the status of this supposedly emergent form. Mary Louise Pratt and Chris Power, perceiving that such anxieties persist in critical discussions of Anglophone short fiction, separately wonder whether sustained attempts to define the form in relational terms are reflective of a larger tendency to consider it preparatory to ‘the proper’ work of the novel.¹¹

From one perspective, this proposition might explain why Bowen wrote so few stories in her later decades. John Self claims that Bowen dispensed with the short form in the aftermath of the Second World War because there was ‘less need of the ready income that stories provided’ following the commercial success of a few of her novels.¹² A problem with this line of argument is its under-appreciation of the value of the form – or rather, the forms – of the short story. A further problem is that it underestimates the importance that short fiction held for Bowen. Not only is this evident in the quality of stories that were included in each of her seven volumes of short fiction; it is also apparent in the uncollected, unpublished, and unfinished stories that were posthumously assembled in The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008). In addition, Bowen’s belief in the short story – in its practice and its promise – is manifest in the constellation of essays that she wrote on the subject over the course of her career. The fact that a significant number of those essays were produced in the years after the Second World War – the period in which she published hardly any new stories – merely confirms her commitment to the form. In many of those essays, Bowen engaged with short story writers of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Seán O’Faoláin, Eudora Welty, and Mary Lavin figure among the writers she discusses. In several of those texts, Bowen explores what the short story writer can do that the novelist cannot. ‘The Short Story in England’ (1945) is a case in point. In this essay, she contemplates the techniques of omission and suggestion, and she rejoices that ‘the short story promised to do in prose what had, so far, only been done in poetry’ (PPT 311).

These principles were reiterated a decade and a half later, in 1960, when Bowen taught a course on short fiction at Vassar College. Bowen sketched some of the ideas for that course in two notebooks, now housed at the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin. In her notes, Bowen confirms her belief in the radical potential of the short form. She also records her conviction that the short story – in particular, ‘the magical story’ or ‘the ghost story’ – is especially attuned to writing the uncanny. By uncanny, she means ‘the unknowable, something beyond the bounds of rational knowledge’. Such stories have the capacity to make strange, she argues, because ‘the short story of this kind must absorb “everyday” detail into a peculiar atmosphere of its own’.¹³ Bowen’s otherworldly story of the blitz, ‘Mysterious Kôr’, is a celebrated example of such practice; the remorseless light of a full moon is projected onto the streets of a weirdly deserted London, lending the silent city a semblance of ‘the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct’ (CS 728). Other acclaimed instances include ‘Look at All Those Roses’, with its languorous pace, its ‘feeling of unreality’, and its sinister fairy-tale-realist setting, which is described as ‘look[ing] like a trap baited with beauty, set ready to spring’ (CS 514). Each of these texts exemplifies the truth of Bowen’s assertion that the short story ‘is an affair of reflexes, of immediate susceptibility, of associations not examined by reason: it does not attempt a synthesis’ (CI 38). Such a conceptualisation ‘depends upon the suppression or exclusion of information’, Allan Hepburn notes, while making a virtue of compactness, an element that encourages readers to think about stories as ‘convey[ing] the effect of spontaneity’, and ‘bear[ing] a whiff of unfinishedness’, even when those stories are meticulously organised and sensitively arranged.¹⁴ It is also founded upon the principle that the form, or perhaps forms, of short fiction are productively uncertain, and that the same story can be simultaneously concise, expansive, and wonderfully strange.