Like ghosts, orphans in Elizabeth Bowen's fiction represent what domesticity and the family cannot accommodate, whether in Anglo- Ireland, upper-middle-class England or wartime London. Laden with a variety of simultaneous meanings, these orphans are distilled remnants of the persistent past, evidence of repressed family scandal, often the result of uncontrolled sexual passion, and often of a family’s lack of control over women's sexuality. In Bowen's short stories the misunderstood past emerges as ghosts: in the novels it persists as orphans. While literary orphans throughout the nineteenth century signalled change, breaks from tradition and disconnections from the community that provoked moral confusion, Bowen's orphans drift in modernity, severed from a troubling past, even while serving as symbols of it, while they struggle with disjunctions from not only cultural history and family traditions, but also because the future is uncertain. Reading Elizabeth Bowen's many central orphan protagonists in the post-colonial context allows us to see that they embody her sense that the early twentieth century consists of historical and temporal traumas in Ireland and in England. This chapter will also argue that modernity's reluctance to acknowledge the past, in the eagerness to make everything new, appears for Bowen in her depictions of orphans who stand for unassimilated aspects of the past.

Whether adults or children, Bowen orphans metonymically represent disruptions of links with the past by being the last in the line of their family amidst the dispossession that typifies the experience of modernity. For modern Anglo-Irish Bowen, history's movement severs people from their tradition yet persists in repressed memory in ghosts, heirlooms and in the figure of the orphan, disconnected from the past, and yet powerless over the future. The Anglo-Irish people, in general, come to seem orphaned in the post-colonial era, as in The Last September where the protagonist, orphan Lois, becomes the distillation of the predicament of her extended family's orphanhood, and the orphanhood of her extended family, class and ancestors. At the end of the novel she is at art school in Paris while Danielstown, the Big House, burns to the ground. This severance of Anglo-Irish ties to Ireland invalidates their culture, and obliterates their social and political authority: they become historical remnants. Lois is a vestige of her class and culture, whose geographical upheaval means she has no home country.