People, Places, Things

Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in "Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris with a startling awareness of the tension among international delegates desperate to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House"& mdash;owners evacuated during the war only to return to empty homes. Other essays, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable critiques of the state of literature. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period. The essays in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any kind of collection, and some existed only as typescript drafts.