English novelists

Britain in Pictures #23

by Elizabeth Bowen

criticism by elizabeth bowen

Genres: Nonfiction

47 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1976

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

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating to hear Bowen, an accomplished novelist herself, attempt to cover the history of the English novel in forty pages and bear in mind she was writing during WWII for a series intended to maintain a feeling of national identity. What a challenge but she rises to it.

[David Burkam · Rating 4 out of 5]

All books in this series face a monumental task: how to refresh the memories and re-educate the British people as to who they are and where they came from (in fewer than 50 pages). The topics are timeless and deserve continual re-evaluation, but that broad assessment is essential at critical moments in history.

Bowen's final thoughts on the English novelists make that critical moment explicit:

"In their [contemporary novelists'] hands, the novel takes a poetic turn. Is this because we live in an age of ideas and passions, in which individual destinies count for less, in which people take less colour from their surroundings because these surroundings change from day to day? One great war has already left, and now another has also placed, its mark on English habit, feeling and thought. I do not think English essentials will ever change—but events make us sharply conscious of what these are. The novelist of to-day must think for himself: this is no time to add random comments to life. So the English novel gains in self-consciousness—it may have lost some of the old spontaneity."