The Last September Elizabeth Bowen

The Last September Elizabeth Bowen

Overview:

The story traces Lois's growing awareness of herself as an adult, and her efforts to find out what she wants to do with her life. As is almost always the case in an Elizabeth Bowen novel, what happens is not as important as what the author observes about what happens and who it's happening to. Bowen is a master of language and of characterization. In this beautifully written novel she creates a gallery of finely articulated, minutely observed and exquisitely individual characters, who seem as real as the people you know in your own life.

Although The Last September was first published in 1929, a preface was written for this text decades later to be included in the second American edition of this novel. Concerned that readers unfamiliar with this particular chapter of Anglo-Irish history would not fully comprehend the anxieties of these times, Bowen takes great pains to explain the particulars of both her writing process and the political reasons for the unsettled atmosphere felt throughout the text, palpable even in its most seemingly serene moments. Of all her books, Bowen notes, The Last September is “nearest to my heart, and it had a deep, unclouded, spontaneous source. Though not poetic, it brims up with what could be the stuff of poetry, the sensations of youth. It is a work of instinct rather than knowledge—to a degree, a ‘recall’ book, but there had been no such recall before.” While Bowen’s own beloved family home, Bowen’s Court, remained untouched throughout “The Troubled Times” this preface explores the ramifications for witnesses of “Ambushes, arrests, captures and burning, reprisals and counter-reprisals” as “The British patrolled and hunted; the Irish planned, lay in wait, and struck.” “I was the child of the house from which Danielstown derives” Bowen concludes, “nevertheless, so often in my mind’s eye did I see it burning that the terrible last event in The Last September is more real than anything I have lived through.”

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Sincerelyours