Elizabeth Bowen : The Shadow Across the Page

In this authoritative introduction to her life and work, Maud Ellmann teases out Bowen’s strangeness through close readings informed by historical, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive methods of interpretation.

WINNER of the British Academy''s Rose Mary Crawshay Literary PrizeThis study reveales both the pleasures offered by Elizabeth Bowen''s works to the general reader and the literary critic, theorist and historian.Elizabeth Bowen was one of the finest writers of fiction in English in the twentieth century and one of the strangest. Born in 1899, her historical vision extends from the Irish Troubles of the 1920s to the London Blitz and the technological revolution of the post-war years. Her fiction is always entertaining - funny, moving and full of suspense - but it is also profoundly disconcerting.Maud Ellmann teases out Bowen''s strangeness through close readings informed by historical, psychoanalytic and deconstructive methods of interpretation. She contextualises Bowen''s work in the Irish and modernist traditions to investigate connections between her life and writing. She thoroughly expores Bowen''s conflicting and complicit relations with other Irish, British, and European writers, her negotiations bet