Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen is now recognized as a major British novelist and short story writer. Phyllis Lassner shows how Bowen's Anglo-Irish heritage made her an astute critic of women's possibilities and constraints. In a reassessment of Bowen's major fiction, The Last September, Friends and Relations, To the North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and ^IThe Heat of the Day, the author shows how Bowen's novels of manners and sensibility also revise traditional notions of female character. This feminist reading of Bowen's life and novels explores her concerns for women's creative and sexual expression in a society where great social change threatens traditional values. At a time when women were achieving professional careers and making independent choices for their personal lives, Bowen's novels provide a critique of the literary and social conventions which constrained women in maternal roles. Phyllis Lassner shows how contemporary feminist theory establishes Bowen's compelling importance for contemporary readers.