The Little Girls

by Elizabeth Bowen

In 1914, three eleven-year-old girls buried a box in a thicket on the coast of England, shortly before World War I sent their lives on divergent paths. Nearly fifty years later, a series of mysteriously-worded classified ads brings the women reluctantly together again. Dinah has grown from a chubby, bossy girl to a beautiful, eccentric widow. The clever, reticent Clare has blossomed into an imperious entrepreneur of independent means. And Sheila - who was once the pretty princess of her small universe - has weathered disappointed aspirations to become a chic and glossily correct housewife.

As these radically different women confront one another and their shared secrets, the hard-won complacencies of their present selves are irrevocably shattered. In a novel as subtle and compelling as a mystery, Elizabeth Bowen explores the buried revelations - and the dangers - that attend the summoning up of childhood and the long-concealed scars of the past.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Historical Fiction, Novels, Irish Literature

307 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me this novel is overloaded with mystification. Bowen is trying too hard to charge every line of dialogue, every piece of descriptive writing with psychological insight. When it works it’s brilliant but too often here it doesn’t and she seems guilty of the charge most often levelled at her – that she is more sensibility than substance. There’s far too much elaborately described minutiae in this book.

The Little Girls has a terrific premise. Three elderly women meet up again to dig up the coffer containing secret cherished objects they buried as children. The novel is divided in three parts – the middle section shows us the three women as the children they once were.

The characters, like the narrator, skirt around the many mysteries raised, few of which don’t remain hidden from us. Her experiments with dialogue are at their most stylised here. Apparently throwaway lines, often with inverted sentence structures, are wired with depth charges and explode relentlessly. Here it’s a technique that seems like a hit and miss mannerism; in the subsequent Eva Trout it acquires a masterful artistry - the ostensibly realistic and throwaway dialogue containing within its linguistic mannerisms, contortions and inversions deep psychological truths about the private soul of the speaker. It’s dialogue as oracle but expressed in simple everyday language. In The Little Girls however it felt like Bowen is forcing meaning on everything as if we’re in the midst of a poem, not a novel.

Along with her first two books, The Hotel and Friends and Relations, my least favourite Bowen novel.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, Welty and Maxwell mention Elizabeth Bowen quite often, with affection, but also, or so it seemed to me, with amused tolerance as well. Reading between the lines, I got the feeling she could be idiosyncratic, perhaps even difficult, though they both seemed to unconditionally love her.

From the little bit I've read of Bowen, her style seems to reflect the personality I've gleaned. Her syntax is purposely awkward (Yoda-speak, we might call it now), as are her characters and their dialogue. Many times a line needs to be read twice to get at its meaning, though if I rearrange the syntax in my head, it doesn't work as well as what's on the page -- obviously she knew what she was doing. And I certainly don't mind novels that make me 'work.'

In this novel there's the present, then the past (She throws us into the middle of evocative childhood scenes, also not always easy to understand what is going on at first. This section reminded me a bit of The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor, another Anglo-Irish writer.), then back to the present again, with enough 'mystery' to keep the reader reading.

As the last chapter spools out, I felt an excitement, as I knew all the 'work' would be worth it. Its effectiveness increased as each page was turned, with the last three pages being the loveliest of all.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mistakes have histories, but no beginnings - like, I suppose, history?

Bowen's style is always, famously, elliptical - but here it seems to tip over into the obscure for me. Nothing about this late work really engaged me: the premise of recalling a friendship trio fifty years later smacks of soap opera and could have had a literary make-over but I could never really get a handle on the emotions between these women or what exactly they felt they needed to hide. Their older incarnations are brittle and mannered, often bitchy in a mid-twentieth century way, that holds some humour but also left me feeling a little shameful at what I was being led to laugh at: fat-shaming in one case, the twee-ness of a chain of shops named 'Mopsie Pye'.

What I like about this book is the valedictory feel: these women were aged eleven in 1914 just before WW1 broke out so they're almost the same age as the century itself and have lived through two world wars, some of humanity's darkest moments and realisations, and have survived: undoubtedly battered, in their sixties, with more personal obstacles, failures and successes that they have faced. And I suspect this is one of Bowen's intentions, to focus on older women, the ones too often passed over and ignored especially when this was published in the 1960s.

Bowen's sentences are usually a thing of joy and there were certainly some of her usual sharp observations: a mouth, for example, described as 'having kissed for the last time' - an ocean of sadness and neglect in those five words alone - but a book cannot stand up on wayward syntax and lexicology alone and what I missed in this book is Bowen's more pertinent way of revealing hidden depths of emotions, feelings usually hidden beneath surface personal and social restrictions which she somehow manages to excavate with a delicate and ruthless precision. Here I never really got that.

Compared to other of Bowen's books which I have adored (The Last September, A World Of Love, To the North, The Heat of the Day) this one never revealed that luminosity I so often find in Bowen's vision and a kind of aching, melancholic aura to her creation of a world.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrifically unreadable, and I say that as someone who very much admired the other two Bowen novels I've read. I was ready to abandon this at p. 50 but soldiered on, knowing there was a mystery, a hidden secret at the book's core. But the mystery turned out to be so opaque as to be impenetrable. I still don't know what happened at the end. Why did Dinah want the revolver from the buried 1914 box? To kill herself? How did she get the bruise on her forehead, and why? Why did British girls of this era acquire the most putrid nicknames? I should have guessed that with a book this irritating, this monstrously coy all the way through, there would be no payoff at the end.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think people read Elizabeth Bowen much anymore, except for a few of my friends on Goodreads. She began publishing novels in the 1930s, a bit prior to where My Big Fat Reading Project begins at 1940. I have read three of her novels now. I began with The Heat of the Day, found in a used bookstore in Ireland in 2005. Then I read her atmospheric A World of Love, set in a crumbling Irish manor house.

The Little Girls was published in 1964, the year I am currently, though slowly, reading. As in the two others I have read, I had to slow down and adjust to her sentences. Not many authors these days write sentences which require the reader to pay attention. I fear that a deadly combination of MFA programs, bestsellers that take no more effort than watching TV, and lowering literacy rates (I know, I am a snob) have put us out of the habit of following such sentences. However, in the way that a soft spoken person draws you closer, so does she pull you in towards her carefully developed characters.

Three British women who were friends in school just before the outbreak of WWI are brought back together by the eccentric Dinah in the early 1960s. Their reunion is fraught with all their old rivalries and escapades. The novel moves between those two time periods, a commonplace in many of today's novels though it has been done before and in this case both are equally compelling.

It took many pages for me to identify the three characters because Bowen is (deliberately?) vague as to who is speaking and each one has a nickname as well as a new last name in the present time. Again, she was requiring me to pay attention and pulling me in, page by page, as to how and why those three little girls got up to such pranks and why that might affect them later.

By the end, I felt I had known these women for years. I loved the way she showed that we don't change much, that our embryonic personalities in childhood stay with us as we mature, though with age comes an ability to better understand those we have known since those early years.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Little Girls is not an easy book – it requires close attention and a little patience. Bowen’s sentences are gloriously complex, there were times when I had to stop and re-read sentences. I love Elizabeth Bowen and so I knew I would be rewarded – and I was. I would say though that for a Bowen novice The Little Girls is not the place to start – but one to save for a later day.

The Little Girls is a novel about the past, ageing and friendship, it is about those things that we bury and how we carry them with us. There is a wonderful atmosphere to this novel – the writing is exquisite, but it is also – at times – funny, not something I associate with Elizabeth Bowen. Moving between childhood before World War One to the mid nineteen sixties, there is a wonderful feeling of the past and present being inextricably linked. There are some deliciously tongue-in-cheek moments and wonderfully sharp dialogue. The narrative meanders at times which is why maybe some people find it hard.

The novel takes place on the South Coast of England; Dinah a widow of around sixty is collecting objects from her friends, for her project to bury in a large time capsule, objects that have meant something to their previous owners. Organising the objects on tables in a cave on the beach below her property, Dinah becomes increasingly interested in the past. Frank, Dinah’s friend and near neighbour has been drafted in to help. On her way back up to the house – where her houseboy Francis will have spent her absence rifling through her waste paper basket – Dinah is reminded suddenly of her childhood.

full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the Goodreads description provides more detail than it ought, though there is nothing there that is actually a spoiler. The Little Girls burying the box isn't revealed until after page 75 when there is a time shift sandwiched in between the two sections of present day. Present day, in this instance, the reader must remember, is not the 21st Century, but the late 1950s or early 60s. This section of 1914, includes my favorite passage, because it is me, reading.

To disturb Mrs. Piggott once she was in a novel was known to be more or less impossible; . . . But for the periodic flicker as she turned a page, Mrs. Piggott, diagonal on the sofa, might have been a waxwork. . . . The scarlet, brand-new novel, held up, masked its wholly-commanded reader's face. Though nominally she was "lying" on the sofa, the upper part of the body of Mrs. Piggott was all but vertical, thanks to cushions—her attitude being one of startled attention, sustained rapture, and in a way, devotion to duty. The more flowing remainder of her was horizontal: feet, crossed at the ankles, pointing up at the end. She was oblivious of all parts of her person as she was of herself. As for her surroundings, they were nowhere.

But this isn't about a woman reading, and Mrs. Piggot is the mother of one of the main characters. This is about childhood friends meeting after having been taken their separate ways some 50 years earlier. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to become reacquainted with my dearest childhood friend, and we, too, had neither seen nor heard of one another for over 50 years. Alas, we had become too different for the relationship to withstand the novelty of our renewed acquaintance. So, from that perspective, I did not expect the women in the novel to reform the friendship.

This is well worth reading because it makes one think about relationships. I think relationships work because we want them to work despite differences between the individuals. We can either accept - even embrace - the differences, or we can allow them to annoy us severely and walk away. Think marriage, not just renewed childhood friendships. Even so, I didn't just love this book, and I'll let it sit toward the bottom of my 4-star reads.

[Lisa Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowen's narrative style has much in common with her contemporaries, calling to mind especially Woolf and Henry Greene. As much remains oblique, even hidden from the reader, as is clear. There were so many times that I thought after reading an interaction between characters, for instance the one between Dinah and her mother and Clare's father at a birthday picnic, "Did I miss something? Is there something more here?" That said, I do not see this as a failing, but an accurate rendering of human interaction. People so rarely say all they mean or even what they mean. Why should it be any different in realistic fiction? Sure, it leaves the reader somewhat clueless, but there it is.

The Little Girls is an exercise in the theme of remembrances of things past; how does memory and our relationship with the past affect our present. From the beginning it is clear that the childhood friendship that Dinah is trying to recapture was an uncomfortable one. Immediately upon their reunion, the three women are bickering and insinuating. In general, they are downright unpleasant to one another. Dinah while initially less unpleasant is entirely muddled as to why her former friends are so fractious about her attempt to revive the past and especially her manner of doing so. The middle section of the novel actually goes back to the summer in 1914 when the three as eleven year olds decide to bury a coffer with items intend to mystify later finders. Their relationship then is at one with the bickerings of the renewed relationship making one wonder how they managed a friendship at all, or why one of them would want to renew it.

While two of the women would be pleased to left the past remain a stone unturned, Dinah will not be let it go and finally draws them in, only to be crushed by the failure to achieve what once was. A failure that infects her present and threatens to destroys her unless she can accept the past as a thing changed forever.

The Little Girls is well worth the time especially for readers who like this oblique style. However, I can already hear the complaints, "I hated all the characters," "I couldn't figure out what was going on." I'd say to that, give it time.

The copy I have is a first edition, and the flap describes it as a comic novel. I don't know if more modern editions make this claim. If you are expecting comic, you may be disappointed. Some of the interactions between the woman have something of a bitchy-comic aspect, but overall the story is more sad than funny.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have found Elizabeth Bowen's novels a little hit and miss in the past, but since absolutely adoring The House in Paris, I was eager to read more of her work. I selected The Little Girls as my next choice, and initially found it a little difficult to get into; Bowen's writing is notoriously beautiful and complex, and it always takes me a chapter or two to feel entirely comfortable with the way in which she writes.

The plot of The Little Girls, with a mystery at its heart, appealed to me, and whilst I came away without loving it, it is definitely a novel which I admire. The novel, as with many of Bowen's, is very character driven. I was not, however, pulled in enough to warrant a four or five star rating, and only found myself completely engaged with the section in which the three protagonists were 'little girls'. Bowen, for me, creates far more believable child characters than she does adults, and I was struck by every character trait and peculiarity about them. The dialogue here is often meandering, and a few retorts were utterly nonsensical; this can make the novel feel a little confusing at times. Had The Little Girls contained very little dialogue, the chances are that I would have loved it.

[Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing, allusive, elusive, sparky dialogue, and scenes that could explode on a stage. I struggled at first to find a way to put it all together, to find an over-arching theme or point, but now I've decided there really isn't one. It's about individuals, particulars, and how they change and don't change through life.

One of the key statements is from Clare, the deep thinker, who puts aside Shelley and becomes a shopkeeper.

We were entrusted to one another, in the days which mattered, Clare thought. Entrusted to one another by chance, not choice. Chance, and its agents time and place. Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. You – she thought, looking at the bed – chanced, not chose, to want us again.

There is no overall design or larger theme in the novel, just the gradual revelations of identities that emerge from the random events that shape our lives: the early deaths of fathers, the outbreak of war, the fear we may have killed someone. And yet when the little girls meet nearly 50 years later they still recognise each other and still play the same roles and games with each other. It's not about love or hate, just life.

[Mindy McAdams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to like this novel, and I distinctly did not. Having read Bowen's The Death of the Heart -- and having found it brilliant, amazing, even breath-taking -- I certainly never thought this book would be annoying. I've been thinking about why. The core of the story is quite good: Three childhood friends in England were separated by the start of World War I, when two of them moved to other, distant towns. In her elder years, one of the three runs newspaper ads to find the other two, and they are reunited. This in itself could be very dull -- none of the three has become distinguished in anything, and all are living unremarkable middle-class lives, still in England. But that is not at all the problem.

The problem, for me, has two parts. The worst is the dialogue. It's like a TV comedy skit in which distinctly British people are speaking as obscurely as humanly possible, saying nothing at all as they speak and yet apparently conveying a lot to their equally British companions, who respond in kind. No doubt this all seems immensely clever (see? I begin to sound a bit like them) to some readers (and maybe more so when this novel was published, in 1963, than now) -- but not at all to me.

The other part of the problem is a descriptive style that, given Bowen's demonstrated talent (in The Death of the Heart), is certainly deliberate, but which in this book I found cloying and almost intolerable. All the objects and rooms and houses and lanes are described with select details embellished like frosting on an over-decorated cake. Every now and then a phrase would strike me in a way that I appreciated -- there was a description of Frank, Dinah's neighbor and sort-of boyfriend, that resonated beautifully -- and in moments like that I knew that everything, every word and sentence, was as carefully made as those in The Death of the Heart. Carefully, skillfully, but not in flavors I could savor.

So it's not correct to call this a bad book, or a failed book -- but it might be that its time is past, and it's hard for a 21st century reader to appreciate the style of the story's telling.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 for the beautiful writing. 3 for the convoluted nature of the plot and characters. There was enough to keep me going to the end, but I couldn't really like the characters too much. However, there was a lot of wisdom about the far-reaching arm of childhood memories and how they affect us throughout life. But I have enjoyed several other Bowen novels a lot more than this one.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without making a big historical epic of it, Bowen tells a story of three people living through the long, terrible death of the 19th century, which is to say, the first half of the 20th, and, not entirely willingly, reuniting with their past.

[Ric Cheyney · Rating 5 out of 5]

VIRGINIA WOOLF WITH MUSCLES
This was my first taste of Elizabeth Bowen’s work and, on this evidence at least, I have been missing out big time. I was originally drawn to her work through frequent critical comparisons with Virginia Woolf. This is a useful reference, I believe, as this book focuses on middle class characters and there is a similar tone/style, although Bowen definitely has her own modes of expression, most notably the splitting of direct speech with a central narrative phrase. It is almost a tic in this book, but that is fine with me because another thing that attracted me was the frequent use of the phrase “beautifully written” by critics of her books, and this book is certainly that and more.
I just adored it, giving it a score of 15 out of 10 without any hesitation. Just as Woolf communicates the fragility of life/existence with her tremulous, quivering phrases, so Bowen conjures up the most complex thoughts and feelings about friendship, memory and personal history here, but hers is generally a bolder, more muscular turn of phrase.
The focus on the revived friendship of three women after many years apart is very moving, but not at all sentimental: thoughts and expressions shine with deep intelligence, beautiful nuance and the gentle sadness of irrecoverable younger days.
The plot, such as it is, serves mainly as a vehicle for reflections on these topics, although there is certainly enough mystery and delayed disclosure to keep the reader intrigued. It’s funny too, of course.
Most wonderful of all is the closing section, which contains many poignant moments and a clear-eyed exploration of relationships before a final surprise that is tiny but absolutely beautiful and made me burst into tears of happy sadness. Honestly, gentle reader, this is mature, stylish fiction of the very finest quality, and I only hope that her other books are of a similar standard.
Here are a couple of brief samples from the book to give you a feel of the thing:
“Mrs Piggott, wearing the tussore dust-coat and with her hat bound on with a chiffon motor-veil, scrambled up the land side of the sea wall among the children, on the heels of her daughter. When she reached the top, wind caught the transparent mauve ends of the veil, sending them flying against the sky - which was so lightly grey as to itself seem a veil over wide light. There she stood a minute, looking down at the sands, smiling at the beginnings of so much pleasure; a weather-signal.”
And this:
“One forgets that each tear is shed for the first time.”

[Liz Pardey · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a joy to read the work of a real master. Bowen keeps her readers on their toes. Her sentence structure in descriptive passages is unique.

St Agatha's stared denudedly out to sea; alien became its dead-still tamarisks, cream-cheese gables and garden paterning up behind

My spell check doesn't even recognize some of those words but each is perfect. Then her dialogue -- spot on, each character speaks distinctively, unnecessary 'he said' and 'she replied' are eliminated. The plot moves along but delineated scantly so that the reader has to actually think.
Bowen both tests and trusts her readers' intelligence
Briefly Bowen writes of 20th century Britain -- in this novel her characters are three girls who attended school together; forty or fifty years later Dinah arranges a meeting for the purpose of finding a box they buried while they were at school. And at the end the reader still doesn't know much more than that but there is so much to be thought about. A totally enjoyable experience.
No wonder Bowen received a CBE and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first book by Bowen and probably my last.
The plot is very thin, if there is one at all. The reader is wondering what the book is actually about. Three women are in the center of attention, having been friends as girls, but having grown apart after school, and now, having long passed the peak of their lives (if there even was one), being more or less forced back together by one of them, Dinah. She is dwelling on the past, especially on one (in my opinion very unimportant) particular moment these three have shared: each packed one item into a coffer which they hid. After reuniting, the three decide to retrieve the coffer, only to learn that it is not there anymore. Dinah is completely lost after this.
The style is very difficult to follow. Oftentimes it's hard to understand who is speaking at the moment. Too many words are emphasized by italicizing them. The description of certain things and situations is detailed and therefore quite boring and dire to read.
I forced myself through.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinatingly opaque, and with marvelously complex prose. This is the most willfully abstruse Bowen novel that I've read, and it took me awhile to warm up to it, but ultimately, I really enjoyed its odd withholding quality.

[Chrissie]

**************************
*The Death of the Heart 4 star
*The Last September 4 stars
*The House in Paris 3 stars
*The Demon Lover 2 stars
*The Heat of the Day TBR
*A World of Love TBR
*The Little Girls TBR

[Alejandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't see the point, really. I read until the end hoping for the magic (or the comedy) to turn up but in vain.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should read more general fiction. This year I've been reading a lot of detective fiction, some nonfiction and some YA, but not enough novels for adult readers that are about people and the things inside their heads -- which, all things considered, is the genre I like best. Maybe this is why I found The Little Girls so refreshing.

Specific things I liked about this novel:
* It focuses on three women. The secondary male characters are not defined as love interests.
* The plot develops either when these women are kids or when they're old: none of it has to do with falling in love, marrying, or having children.
* Old age! People getting old and being not parents or grandparents or burdens on other people, but their own complex selves.
* The 1960s, English-countryside, upper-middle-class setting is very cosy, like something you'd want to live in forever.
* There is an element of mystery that keeps you reading. You want to know what happened to these women in those fifty years to make them the way they are.
* Characters are true to life, and Diana especially feels like the kind of person you'd want to have in your life.
* While the novel is steeped in class privilege, it doesn't make the sweeping statements about class I have come to expect from privileged authors.

The dialogue can sometimes feel laboured and the pace of the novel slow, but as I read on I came to enjoy even that. This is a novel broad in scope but which operates under the principle of the synecdoche, so that the events covered in the 300 pages of the book, while important to the characters, affect only a tiny portion of their lives. The slow pace gets to you, because it fits well with Diana's life, which looks quiet and comfortable, and with the nature of the story -- anecdotal in actuality, big in repercussions.

[rr]

Elizabeth Bowen had been on my "authors to read" list for quite some time now, and I'm afraid that I didn't choose my first encounter with her very wisely. The bookstore didn't have any of her more celebrated books, so instead of waiting I bought this one. There's no doubt that Bowen is Up To Something and that she thinks carefully about what she says (and how) and what she doesn't. But I didn't get it. I didn't understand why we should be interested in the characters, their relationships, and their psychologies. I didn't understand why they said what they did to one another. I didn't understand why they were so mean and quick to take offense. I didn't understand why the most mundane details and comments were super-charged in an atmosphere part tinder-box and part mystery. Bowen is masterful at conveying that tinder-box / mystery atmosphere, but I guess I didn't understand what was at stake in Bowen's world and what that might show me about what's at stake in mine.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather oblique, and odd, but perfectly conjures up that moment just before the outbreak of the First World War (there is even a glorious picnic, with a man present who will be dead within weeks at the Front in the war which has not yet broken out). Three schoolgirls bury a box containing important objects in the grounds of their school, in 1914, just before the war and other circumstances separate them. In old age (50 years later) one of them has a similiar "time capsule" idea, and then tries to find her former friends. They are reunited, and they try to recover their buried box. Several things are not really explained but hinted at (such as the relationship between the mother of one and the father of another), the mystery of the fate of the contents of the box, what actually happens to Diana or Dinah at the end (and why she suddenly feels the need to revisit the past). The book is about loss and memories, woth some wry humour and some rather odd social observation.

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is evidently Elizabeth Bowen's last novel and it should have been! Unbelievably hard to read! Perhaps her other books were good, but I will never even try to read them based upon this experience. I have a hang up that once I start a book, I must finish it. What a painful read. There was supposed to be some sort of mystery that the book was leading up to, but the little I figured out certainly was anticlimactic at best, or perhaps I slept through it. Her style of writing at times did not even sound like another culture's way of talking. It was sort of like someone with brain damage or a stroke (and I am not trying to be funny!). What a waste of time.

[renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It had been too long, re-reading this hilarious, yet profoundly moving novel this weekend. I am happy I assigned it in my 20th-c. Brit. Lit. class this term. I wonder why I did not write about it--in my dissertation, then, my first book. I assume one needs to grow old(er) for some literary texts to do their work, rightly.

[Maria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I pushed my way through 95 pages and I give up. Life is too short to read books that feel like a chore. The prose is so smirky, indirect, and wordy. I don't care what the big mystery is.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

SUMMARY - Plenty of humour sits beneath, but you may never want to go to a school reunion again. My 10th and final novel by Bowen is a good'un.
_________________
Coincidences. I was on a train to the coast for Christmas when I got going with this book. Its cover features a painting of three pastel girls bent over sands, which is identified as Walberswick in Suffolk. I then thought I'd check online for more about the author of the book my partner is reading (Louis De Bernières), and listed was his first poetry collection - 'A Walberswick Goodnight Story' (2006). Our train was taking us to the coast for a walk... which is due to take us on to Walberswick, after the last time I was there to propose. The fates have it.

All of which is fairly irrelevant to the review, which is among my most favourable for Bowen. Barring 'Friends and Relations' (1931) that I found fairly tedious throughout, most of Bowen's novels have at the least contained magical moments. 'The Little Girls' may be an unusually insipid title for Bowen, but it conceals one of her most compelling and enjoyable reads. It's possibly the one closest in feel to her wonderful short stories (for which her omnibus got my only five stars). Like Trevor's 'Fools of Fortune' that I read immediately before, it does that telescoping through time that I enjoy so much, whilst also keying in characters and relationships.

If there is one persistent fault I find with Bowen, it's the artificial acidity of her female characters. They joke about being the three witches from Macbeth on the blasted heath, but I wish Bowen had steered away from the grotesque caricatures of bitchy backbiting crones that made Dinah in particular unrecognisable from the more subtle rendering of her cave-set conversation with Frank at the start. Drama is fine; attacks of pique entirely relatable - but Dinah, Clare and Sheila were so routinely vicious to one another, I couldn't fathom why on earth they stayed in the room. It all comes to a more gently-simmering and satisfying resolution, but by this point there had been so much acid, I felt the characters should emerge electro-plated.

Several authors I've been reading (Bowen, Trevor, Farrell, Boyd) seem to like transporting characters back to the First World War. Unlike the others, Bowen was old enough for this to have been contemporary. In fact, she would have been slightly older than the three eleven year-old in 1914, and there is an authentic trace of observation underlying the nostalgia. The brutality of girls who are nevertheless easily bruised themselves is one of Bowen's fortes. The beach in August 1914 becomes its own pre-pubescent battleground, foreshadowing those they would see as adults, both on the global and domestic stages.

When I checked this out from the library, the librarian was saying how interesting he found the central question - what happens to friendships after a large gap of time. I'm not sure that if believed Bowen, any of us would ever attend a reunion again. Still, it's haunting enough in places on loss and recovery, and how far we can ever pick up where we left off.

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now you have to stay awake when you are reading this book. It is definitely not one to take to bed or lie on a sun-lounger with. You need your wits about you and by the end of it, despite my best efforts, I was uncertain whether I had been reading a masterpiece just a little too far beyond my understanding or I understood all too well the author had produced a confusing novel. I have to admit I am not an especially clever person and it was probably the former.

Never mind. So – basically the premise is straightforward. Dinah, Clare and Sheila were schoolfriends years earlier when as eleven year olds they were Dicey, Mumbo and Sheikie and not particularly nice little girls. Dinah wants them to get together again as mature adults – but why? That is where the difficulties start. Dinah seems obsessed with what we would now call time capsules. She has been constructing one, a large one, in a cave near the garden of her house in Somerset which mirrors her childhood challenge of having a “coffer” - a very specific term – in which she, Mumbo and Sheikie could place those things they wish to be remembered by in generations to come, including one item each that they will keep secret from each other. The non-secret items included a metal-linked dog lead which for some reason is referred to as shackles, as in an iron-forged constraint for human beings. Why that should be avoided my attention. Two of the secret items are revealed: Dicey included a pistol she had found hidden in her mother's bedroom, no one knows why it was there, while Shiekie put in her sixth toe. She had been born with an extra toe on one foot, which her mother had kept preserved in a bottle after it was removed. That is only one of several mysterious incidents that are referred to yet seem to have little connection with what plot there is.

The narrative jumps between the present day – the 1960s – and 1914. Most of it is comfortable enough to cope with until one reaches Olive's birthday beach party dated July 23, 1914. That is one month before Clare's father was killed at the Battle of Mons at the start of the First World War. I am not certain of the relevance of that as with much else in the plot and I not sure now who Olive was, other than Mr. and Mrs. Pocock's daughter. At the party young Trevor, who grows to become Shiekie's husband, runs away and hides in a filthy drain pipe and refuses to come out after being frightened by Dicey and a box of matches. All the children join in singing “Way down upon the Swan-eeee river” at some length. It's very funny, but why? In fact the whole section of the children's party is the most refreshing and amusing part of the book. Of course, I understand that it may be there to indicate the last summer of happiness before the War started destroying everyone's lives but only twelve pages later we are back in the 1960s. Dinah's collapse and bump on the head near the end has suggestions of a whodunnit but it seems to turn out that no one did. It was some sort of accident.

I was left convinced that I had missed something yet, strangely and at the same time, knew I had enjoyed it all immensely. One day I will have to read it again and may be a third time. The answers are in there, I'm sure of it.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen is one of my favourite authors and this is one of her later novels, published in 1964, less than a decade before her death in 1973. The opening of the novel revolves around Dinah Delacroix (nicknamed Dicey as a child) who is reflecting on her schoolfriends, Sheila (Sheikie) and Clare (Mumbo). As schoolgirls, the three friends buried a coffer, with secret items that were precious to them in it. Now, Dinah decides to put adverts in newspapers, to try to contact them.

Having noticed the adverts, Clare - now the owner of a chain of shops - and Sheila - who has married a local boy known to the girls and settled down to a comfortable and respectable life - confer to discuss what on earth Dinah wants. Eventually, the three women meet up and fall back into childhood roles and alliances. Two sections set in the present date, bookend a middle part which is set when the girls are at school, just before WWI.

Dinah, Clare and Sheila are very much products of the twentieth century, whose lives have seen two world wars and are of a generation who were expected to cope with what life threw at them. Still, they have disappointments and frustrations. Possible careers that stalled, childlessness (a sorrow in Bowen's own life), unspoken relationships between two of the girls parents, and failed marriages are among topics shrugged off but obviously deeply felt.

This novel is probably not the best choice if you have never read Bowen before, as it requires patience and concentration, but she is always rewarding and a joy to read in my opinion. I thought this a beautiful read which deals with the weight of childhood, the things we have to carry around that make and wound us, and of lives blighted by conflict. I am glad I read this and, if not quite a five star read for me, was a solid four.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

author 1899-1973. This book 1964. Set in 1914 and then in 1963.

Authors I like and respect admire[d] Bowen greatly.
So I would *like* to say I thought this was a good book, but I don't.

Other goodreaders mention the excess of descriptive details that so often seem to have no reason to be there. And the difficulty of figuring out what is actually going on in the story and why the three girls/women [whether in childhood or 50 years later] seem to get along so poorly and are so aggressive with each other and suspicious of each other.

It's quite confusing to read, and somehow I did not feel sufficiently interested to reread to try to make more sense of things/characters.

I note that there are quite a lot of words and expressions unfamiliar to me [which is fine], seems to indicate Bowen is using a more colloquial and contemporary style of speech for the dialog.

I've read only one of her books before this, and perhaps will eventually read the two titles which are usually said to be her best ones.

WIKIPEDIA:
"Bowen was greatly interested in "life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off", in the innocence of orderly life, and in the eventual, irrepressible forces that transform experience. Bowen also examined the betrayal and secrets that lie beneath a veneer of respectability. The style of her works is *highly wrought* and owes much to literary modernism."

[Mary Sisney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure when and why I bought this novel. It's been on one of my bookshelves for years. But I'm happy I paid only $1.85 for it. That was probably a dollar too much. Bowen's novel is not the worst that I've read. That's still ULYSSES, which I read four times, but it's definitely in the bottom ten. With the exception of the male servant Francis, I didn't find the characters likable or interesting, nor was the plot (if you can call it a plot) engaging. Was the author, who seemed to have a sense of humor, doing a Seinfeld parody of plotless novels with unlikable characters? The style was also strange, which would have worked if the novel was a first person narrative so that we could laugh at the narrator's pomposity. Was the writer pompous? Here are some of the words found in this peculiar novel--"habituatedly," "pachydermatous," "gerrumphed," which I assume is a synonym for "harrumphed." I did find it interesting how the discussion of menstruation was handled in this 1963 novel. I also appreciated that it was relatively brief. If it were as long as ULYSSES, I would not have finished it. I'm not in graduate school anymore, and I can read (or not read) what I want.