To the North

by Elizabeth Bowen

A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her late husband's sister, Emmeline. Drawn to each other in the wake of their loss, the two set up house together and gradually become more entwined than they know. But the comfortable refuge they have made is "a house built on sand"; both realize it cannot last. While Cecilia, capricious and unsure if she can really love anyone, moves reluctantly toward a second marriage, Emmeline, a gentle and independent soul, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed for the first time by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Bowen’s psychological acuity is on full display in a conclusion that plumbs the depths of this seemingly detached young woman in a single, life-shattering moment.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Ireland, 20th Century, Novels, Irish Literature, British Literature

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1932

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

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's bad enough being a woman", exclaimed Cecilia with passion, "but I can't think why girls of that age were ever born!"

I wonder what it does to my confused mind to read Jane Austen, Christa Wolf and Elizabeth Bowen alternately over the course of this strange year. Looking at the condition humaine, or rather the condition féminine, through the eyes of strongwilled, highly intelligent writers describing the tempora and mores they experience, I am supposed to open my eyes to the peculiarities of my own time and place.

And?

In a way, nothing ever changes, I say, quoting an ancient philosopher, only to retort to myself that nothing ever stays the same either, quoting another thinker.

Certain elements of women's lives drastically changed between Austen and Bowen, and Bowen's heroines Cecilia and Emmeline move in a world which offers them infinitely more space than Fanny ever found at Mansfield Park, for example. They can drive, they can choose which parties to go to, they even get away with having a lover and not getting married.

And yet, so little changed in the emotional situation of women during the century that separates Bowen from Austen. It took another century, and writers of the calibre of Christa Wolf, to fully establish intellectual equality in at least part of (liberal) society. Christa Wolf's daughters do not suffer from the same kind of humiliation that ultimately drives Bowen's Emmeline over the edge - as she is stuck between her modern way of life and her Austen-esque definition of female propriety and honour. Thou shalt marry! Or die in the attempt.

To The North is a novel of movement: a geographical, social, emotional perpetuum mobile! In the end, the speed of life gets out of control, and the inexperienced modern human being crashes...

Recommended for its exquisite prose, its truer than life characters, its snapshots of modernity in the making, and its accurate rendering of the eternal dilemma of the "good girl".

Funnily, I believe we owe it to the crash landings of countless Emmelines that we have freedom of choice today. Obviously, we still carry the condition humaine on our shoulders, though. Only freedom FROM thought would liberate us from ourselves. And that can hardly be desirable.

[Fionnuala]

Travel is a major theme in To the North, so the title is very well chosen. However the journeys we hear about in the course of this London based novel are not to the north but instead to the south towards Southern Europe and Africa, or to the east, in the direction of India and China, or even westwards to the US. The trip to the north happens only in the final pages but it provides a most fitting ending.

Although some of the scenes in the novel concern the planning of trips to all of the places I've mentioned, the action mostly happens in London. There are two trips worth mentioning though: the opening one, a train journey from Italy back to London; and the closing trip, the journey from London to the north which provides the title. The events we read about between the opening and closing journeys demonstrate how good Elizabeth Bowen is at framing her stories, something I've noticed in each of the previous novels I've read.

Another facet of her story-telling which recurs from book to book is the theme of the destruction of innocence, but here it is treated from quite a different angle. The innocent character is not a teenager as in most of her novels but an independent young woman, running a travel bureau in 1920s London, a time when air travel was becoming affordable. Emmeline Sommers is a pioneer in many ways and her life should proceed according to her own plan for it: her business comes first. However, she shares a house with her young and widowed sister-in-law who is Emmeline's opposite in every way. Cecilia Sommers isn't interested in having a job; her only ambition is to remarry in order to maintain her comfortable standard of living. On the train trip from Rome at the beginning of the book, she flirts with a stranger whom she then introduces into Emmeline's life, upsetting the balance that has been built so carefully. The result is that for the first time in her life Emmeline is without direction, desperately lost and lonely.

All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?

If that line from the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, occurred to me during this book it is because Emmeline Sommers lives within sight of London's Abbey Road, and there are the same number of syllables in both names. I found myself automatically inserting her name in the lyrics as they played in my mind.

Emmeline Sommers
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for...

The song and the book will be forever associated in my memory. But that's not a bad thing.
Both are very beautiful.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very much Elizabeth Bowen finding her voice and feet as a novelist. In her first novel, The Hotel, she pilfered and employed, far less successfully, the multiple perspective Virginia Woolf deploys in the second half of The Voyage Out. The identity of Woolf's heroine is thus composed of what various people think about her, which was Woolf's way of exploring the bottomless mystery of identity. Needless to say, Bowen's heroine is far less interesting than Woolf's so as a technique with Bowen it doesn't cut much ice.

To the North shares the same fidgety perspective except, unlike with The Voyage Out, there's no real purpose to it. It's like, for the time being, the only way she knew how to construct a novel was to flit from one perspective to another without having full command of motive. The narrative keeps losing focus, like someone who begins talking without quite knowing what she is going to say. Not surprisingly, the quality of the prose also declines when she's busying herself with characters who have little dramatic purpose. The main characters here are all rough-hewn prototypes of characters Bowen was to create with far more power, artistry and lucidity further down the line - the innocent waif sowing discord, the charming rake who knows no loyalty, the world-weary social butterfly, the interfering sexless older woman, the benign old gent who exudes the comfort of a hot water bottle.

In short, there's a lot of brilliant writing but there's also some overwrought rather vacuous digressions. Better than The Hotel but falls short of her best work. But then she was only thirty-two when she wrote it. It's got an average rating here of 3.69 which I'd say is pretty spot on.

[Kalliope · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this when I had headed in the opposite direction of the title. I found this novel in a bookshop when I lived in the Tropics. There and then visiting bookshops were experiences in randomness. It was pointless to look for any particular book, but one found unexpected things. So there this was – the North in the South. The novel did not grasp me entirely – maybe there was a mismatch somewhere.

In this second read my impression has changed but the feeling of mismatch I found this time in the situation presented – when one tries to accommodate pieces that do not go together several things can happen. One of them is tragedy.

Bowen’s writing is not easy. There are so many veils (as though seen through a wrapping of gauze). This may not seem surprising in a novel in which evening dresses, and their colours, loom so prominently – almost fatally—and where objects are surrounded in charm and mystery. But veils here also figure apart from the suggestive outfits that the characters wear. These veils make intentions, reactions, thoughts, feelings, associations, hard to grasp and to envision. In such a world, misunderstandings, faulty communication, deceitful conclusions abound. And the reader has to make her way through these elusive characters (this always parting, this always going away) paying attention to each word, no matter how vague and evasive they may seem (perfunctory way of saying things).

Several times in my reading I stopped to savour more consciously the beauty of some sentences: The cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them as street by street the heat and exasperation of London kept flaking away.

And with this other sample: Each tried to picture the other, unknown, balancing down a train corridor; unconscious, each veered round those inches that brought them full-face for a quick rush of words on her part, a wrapt (sic) inattention on his, Bowen’s poignant rendition of mismatches really came to the fore for me.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Emmeline, who said nothing, drove, as though away from the ashy destruction of everything, not looking back. Running dark under their wheels the miles mounted by tens: she felt nothing. Like a shout from the top of a bank, like a loud chord struck on the dark, she saw 'TO THE NORTH' written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow.

For about two-thirds of this book it feels like Austenesque social comedy: Lady Waters interferes in the lives of various young women, Gerda agonises about the state of her marriage as she and her husband make themselves the subject of social gossip, awkward Julian dithers over who to propose to... but there is something bleaker just beneath the surface.

Cecilia was widowed after just a year of marriage and feels unable to ever give herself to love again; the young girl, Pauline, is passed around between relatives; and Emmeline... well, Emmeline appears to be a 'new woman' with her money invested in a small and successful travel agency that she runs with a male colleague - but it turns out that she's the archetypal Bowen 'innocent' who is about to experience the death of her heart.

I like Bowen in humorous mode a lot, but this book really floored me in the last third or so as the emotional intensity ramps up from the trip to Paris through to the journey to Connie's cottage and the fall-out from that. And those final taut, agonising pages are some of the best writing I've seen from Bowen, leaving me breathless and a-tingle.

So this was 4-stars through most of the book with a leap up towards the end. And managing that switch is an act of literary mastery.

Oh, and I'm desperate for a pair of snakeskin (faux, of course) shoes as featured on the Vintage cover!

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two Women

I have praised the beautiful Anchor editions of Elizabeth Bowen before (for instance, The House in Paris or her masterpiece The Death of the Heart ), and this one, with its luscious portrait of a society beauty on the cover, is no exception. But back-cover blurbs can be deceiving. For instance: "A young woman's secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen's most acclaimed novels." True enough as far as it goes, but it totally hides the fact that, for most of its length, To the North (1932) plays as a social comedy in the manner of Jane Austen. Consider this sentence:

The other guests for the week-end were a young married couple, the Blighs, who might, Lady Waters was certain, still save their marriage if they could get right away from people and talk things out, and a young man called Farquharson who had just broken off his engagement on Lady Waters' advice.

How deliciously the added detail about Farquharson casts doubt on Lady Waters' view of the poor Blighs! Contrast the impression of Lady Waters' husband, virtually channeling the whole line of not-quite-in-touch Austen father-figures: “Those young Blighs seem devoted, never apart; it's quite pretty to see them." Read slowly enough to savor, this is a very funny book.

Bowen's subjects, like Austen's, are typically young women in adolescence or early adulthood. But, as Henry James did in The Portrait of a Lady, she takes them out of their domestic surroundings and thrusts them into modern society. Bowen gives us two young ladies: a young widow, Cecilia Summers, and her sister-in-law Emmeline, an independent businesswoman who runs a travel bureau (travel by train, air, or auto plays a significant part in the novel). Although close friends, the two are strongly contrasted: Cecilia stylish, but emotionally exhausted and barely able to cope with practical matters; Emmeline supremely competent, but shy and emotionally naive. For most of the book, very little happens, but we can deduce a great deal, in Jamesian fashion, by reading in between the lines of what does. That "affair," for instance, is implied only through hints. By the end of her career, as in The Heat of the Day (1949), Bowen would describe sexual relationships unambiguously if not in detail, but in this relatively early novel (1932) she is almost as reticent as James himself. In both books, she is less interested in the facts of a relationship than its ultimate effects.

Bowen does a lot by indirect means. The book is full of landscape descriptions, evocative in themselves, and even more so as a reflection of character. A man in a bad mood walks in a suburban park:

Then someone's wife opened a cold piano: she tinkled, she tippetted, she struck false chords and tried them again. God knows what she thought she was doing. The notes fell on his nerves like the drops of condensed mist all round on the clammy beech-branches.

Contrast his optimistic lover:

The glades of St. John's Wood were still at their brief summer: walls gleamed through thickets, red may was clotted and crimson, laburnums showered the pavements, smoke had not yet tarnished a leaf. The heights of this evening had an airy superurbanity: one heard the ping of tennis-balls, a man wheeled a barrow of pink geraniums, someone was practising the violin, sounds and late sunshine sifted through the fresh trees.

This feeling for ambiance is essential to the bookend chapters that frame To the North and give the book its title—two journeys, both at night: a train trip from Milan to Calais in the rain, and a car drive northwards out of London. They balance one another with a symmetry that holds the entire novel between them, brilliantly contrasting the two central women, and answering the earlier comedy with seriousness. The novel may have flaws—it flags about half-way through, and the men are less well-realized than the women—but it remains a penetrating study of the interwar period when many women were looking to define themselves other than through traditional society expectations. And when Bowen pulls everything together in the last fifty pages, the result is quite simply magnificent.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really enjoyable read. The writing is very good, lots of sly humour and clever observations that make you read them twice to catch the meaning and then the latter parts of the novel are so tense …it’s quite a build up. It’s about two sister-in-laws, Cecelia, a widow and Emmeline who share a house in London and their various relationships. There’s also Lady Waters, complicatedly related to both main characters who is always interfering in the lives of others. Emmeline runs a travel agency with a partner, Peter, both of them are tyrannised by their secretarial help. First, an incompetent one and then she’s replaced by the complete opposite, so efficient the business loses all personality. An interesting read showing the superficiality of society, and the roles of women changing slowly.

[Issicratea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A latecomer to Elizabeth Bowen, I have now read three of her novels in close succession: The Last September (1929), To the North (1933), and The Death of the Heart (1938). To the North was my least favourite of the three, but that isn’t too much of a criticism. Bowen is an extraordinary novelist, and To the North is still a haunting, memorable, and beautifully written work.

From what I am gathering so far, one of Bowen’s most characteristic and productive thematic furrows is the failed—or half-failed—relationship: Lois and Gerald in The Last September, Emmeline and Markie in To the North, Portia and just about everyone in The Death of the Heart. Without being obvious misfits, her characters meet the world and its demands obliquely. They are slightly out of kilter, and love relationships, in particular, are the fault line on which they founder. Bowen is a brilliant painter of interiors and the world that she conjures reminds me a little, in mood, of the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi: subtle, subdued, faintly suspended, a world of interstices and pauses.

To be a little more concrete, one interest of Bowen’s work is her exploration of the position of women, especially women of the social elites, in the 1920s and 30s: a time of transition, when new possibilities (work!) are shadowing forth, yet older attitudes, especially to sex and marriage, still hold much of their power. These themes are captured very well in the contrasted figures of the sisters-in-law and housemates Cecilia and Emmeline Summers, who reminded me a little of certain pairings of female figures in Anita Brookner (a novelist I can now see learned a great deal from Bowen and who shares some of her Hammershøi-like atmospherics). Cecilia is more of a survivor, with a certain hardness to her; Emmeline an ‘innocent’ (a moral type of great importance to Bowen, it seems to me, to judge from The Death of the Heart).

The novel opens with Cecilia meeting Markie on a train as she returns to England from Italy and engaging in some disengaged flirtation. The travel theme continues through Emmeline’s work, in her splendidly idiosyncratic travel agency (Bowen has a nice line in barely-there humour), before re-emerging devastatingly in the final scene, which gives the book its title. The journey as a metaphor for life is one of the oldest in the book (nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita …), but it is handled here in a wonderfully fresh and nimble way.

There I go! I started off by saying I didn’t love To the North as much as my other two first Bowen novels, but I haven’t managed to find anything too negative to say about it. Looking through my notes, I see I felt Bowen was occasionally straining a little for effect stylistically—more so than in the other two novels—but it clearly didn’t interfere too much with my pleasure in reading.

[Ian Laird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Added quote which I forgot earlier, 1 November 2024

I read To the North immediately after finishing The Death of the Heart, which I found frustrating because of the inertia of most of the characters who are also burdened with a chronic inability to say what they mean.

I concede that I may be the wrong audience for The Death of the Heart, but I had been long anticipating reading my first Elizabeth Bowen because of her high reputation.

Even though it a less polished work than The Death of the Heart, published six years later in 1938, I enjoyed To the North (1932) more because the characters show some initiative, more spirit; at the beginning there is the promise a lively, exuberant romance between Cecelia and Markie, meeting on a train, how wonderful; a very interesting female character, Emmeline, making her way independently in the business world in a new sphere – running a boutique travel agency with her business partner Peter.

But Emmeline, especially, has to contend with the insidious norms of social expectation, personified by Lady Georgina Waters, who feels able and indeed bound to provide advice and guidance wherever it might be needed, or not, within her social circle:

Lady Waters was quick to detect situations that did not exist…she enlarged her own life into ripples of apprehension on everybody’s behalf. Upon meeting, her very remarkable eyes sought one’s own for those first intimations of crisis she was all tuned up to receive. (p15)

It is this atmosphere of pervasive oppressiveness which ultimately contributes to, perhaps even causes, the vengeful ending which is so catastrophic for those involved, even though it is understandable given the palpable feeling that there is no alternative.

It is this pervasive oppressiveness which ultimately contributes to, perhaps even causes, the vengeful ending which is so catastrophic for those involved, even though it is understandable given the palpable feeling that there is no alternative.

While terribly sad, To the North is memorable, with images from the story remaining long after reaching the end.

[Lise Petrauskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dammit! I wanted to give this book five stars! Maybe I wanted something unreasonable, but I'm irritated anyway because I didn't get it. I wanted Bowen to find a way for Emmeline to survive. Why does the strong, independent female character who does not get married always have to die in the end?

I feel the way I sometimes do after having read a short story: a little cheated, left hanging, wondering if that particular end is necessary to communicate the premise of story or if it all the writer could come up with. In this case, I don't think Bowen was out of control of any part of the story, least of all the end.

My frustrations with the end aside, the book as a whole is brilliant and true. Bowen's prose is complex and exact and her emotional insights astonish me. I really cared for the central female character and was entertained by and interested in the others. Each relationship between the characters—it was a tight cast, but they almost all had scenes alone with every other character—provided new insight into them and the world in which they lived.

Bowen's sentences have a rhythm that I was unpredictable. I found myself needing to concentrate fully to glean the full sense of the prose. The extra effort really paid off. She's able to create some incredibly vivid scenes—my favorite is the one in the airplane—in which the balance of energy between characters and the subtlest flow of thought is tracked. The thoughts all lead to actions, too, which, in many such mental books is not the case. None of these scenes are throwaways.

Random notes:

The Woman Question, 1920s London and Paris, Modernity/technology meets British class structure and morality. Cars, telephones, airplanes.

Luminous. Has quality of Virginia Woolf's The Waves without being as abstruse. People are 'magnetized.'

Lady Waters is hilarious.

Is Emmeline heir to Tess?

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sisters in law, sharing a house but living fairly separate but overlapping lives. Lots of movement and travel allusions, though not much actually happens (even travel). The usual brilliant, caustic and slightly surreal analogies.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been diving pretty deep into science fiction and fantasy the last little while, and so reading To the North was a little like exercising unused muscles - not genre, not recent mainstream fiction, something a little older and differently paced, with nothing of the fantastic about it. It's a welcome break and a needed reminder of what books outside my favourite genres are (which is why I always try to keep a couple of classics/essential book lists on my radar.)

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably would have given it 5 stars if it weren't for the ending, which I hated. Was it a cliché at the time, I wonder, or is she part of the process of making it one? I don't know, but I don't like it.

To the North is essentially a pair of love stories; that of two women, Emmeline and Cecilia, and their respective partners. The ups and downs of their interactions are not at all like those of typical love stories, and it's ultimately very hard to say whether the phenomenon described is love, or whether the relationships are "successful," or even, what is "really" happening at all. The more you think about it, the murkier it seems, which is, I think, rather brilliant. I liked the book mainly because I found Emmeline strangely riveting. Ready to listen but astonishingly unresponsive, in love (maybe?) but uncommitted, abstract but somehow real: she's just a really interesting character study.

And there's the language: Bowen's prose is basically perfect, as far as I'm concerned. She gazed at Julian, wishing he were a clock. It's an absolute delight. I reread the few paragraphs about a bus on pg 46 three or four times, just reveling in how fantastically written they are.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of strange- at the start, and for about half the book, I thought this was just light drawing-room comedy. Then I noticed it was getting a bit darker. Everyone felt completely alone, all while pretending to be surrounded by people they loved. Then it got a bit darker again- the main character is called 'inhuman,' and I noticed that yes, indeed, what I'd thought was whimsy could be interpreted as her being detached and emotionally non-responsive. Then it got a bit darker again, when the main character's young man is obviously seen to be an a-hole. And then the final chapter basically says: look at yourself modern world! You suck! You suck so much that you make people go crazy and drive their cars into oncoming traffic!

At the start, I thought, nice and light, three stars. The middle two quarters I thought, this is really great, five stars! The ending's so oddly tacked on - great in its own way, but so cut off from the novel - that I came back to four stars. Well worth reading, though not as good as The Heat of the Day.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leisurely and enjoyable. Also much more comic than I expected: Lady Waters is an amazing creation.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense and compelling story of two sisters-in-law - capricious widow Cecilia and enigmatic Emmeline - who share a quiet home in St John’s Wood, London. Cecilia is being courted by a decent but reserved man, Julian Tower, but finds something lacking in his sensible approach to life and love. She introduces Emmeline to the charismatic but rather louche barrister Mark Linkwater, little realising how this will bring disruption and tragedy to their peaceful existence.

Bowen is an elegant and skilful writer, knowing how to use carefully chosen gaps in her narrative to bring the most important events to the foreground, and focussing on the inner emotions of her characters as these events unfold. It leads to a taut and gripping narrative that pulls the reader into the motives and weaknesses of her characters. Neither Cecilia nor Emmeline are wholly likeable, yet we come to understand them and become involved in their stories.

For me, the ending was disappointing and didn’t match up to the strength of the rest of the book. The tension built up really well to give a sense of foreboding and loss, but the final outcome slipped into hysterical melodrama and broke the spell. Still, a very strong book by an intelligent and sensitive writer, and my first Elizabeth Bowen will definitely not be my last.

[Deea · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite--The Death of the Heart is still the best I've read, but I have several more to go. I love that Elizabeth Bowen writes awful, untrustworthy men so well, and I appreciate the quality of menace that all of the relationships in this book have--but the fact of the matter is that I didn't like even the people I think I was supposed to like, which, with this kind of story, detracted from my ability to be fully engrossed. Still a worthwhile read, though. Markie is a true cad of the highest order and therefore a memorable villain.

[Bloodorange · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me several chapters to make sure whether they did or did not do it, and by that time, the narrative, previously pleasantly uneventful, became wholly preoccupied with matters of Capital M Morality. Bottom line: this novel aged gracefully, but not well.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A key text in my "tastes aren't rational" canon, because if an Anglo-Irish interwar spinster lit classic combining the sensibilities of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Parker isn't for me, what is? But Bowen is really hit or miss for me. In this novel as in Death of the Heart, a tight set-up dissolves into a diffuse, rambling not-quite-plot; the tone oscillates between boredom and bathos; and the style doesn't know when to quit.

Storywise, the four main characters--remote, swoony Emmeline, narcissistic Cecilia, impotent Julian, and caddish Markie--were interesting enough, while their relationships were still in flux. But the minute the couples crystallized I started yawning. The death of innocence is a theme in Bowen that I've never really loved, and innocent Emmeline becomes less and less interesting as her relationship to the bullying, boorish Markie progresses. It's obvious they aren't a good match. This guy makes Caspar Goodwood look like a real prize. The fact that the relationship ends in a melodramatic car crash is not particularly surprising; the real surprise would be if it worked out. The other couple in the book is slightly more interesting--Cecilia despite her banal surface has more depth as a character in my opinion--but it's an interesting fizzle. I guess "interesting fizzle" would be the Anita Brookner take, so maybe I really am that predictable.

I did find one thing arresting about Emmeline, something rarely if ever discussed in books of this period: she has poor eyesight, and she doesn't wear her glasses. I'm extremely nearsighted, and the descriptions of her fuzzy, foggy world, and the way it isolates her and makes everything slightly unreal to her, were dead-on. Everyone thinks Emmeline is so ethereal and remote but actually she just can't see. At one point she puts on her glasses to look at something specific and her world snaps into sharp, almost overwhelming clarity and beauty. And then her stupid boyfriend shows up and is like "you know I don't like you in spectacles" and the leaves dissolve back into green fluff. Fuck Markie. As far as I'm concerned, he gets exactly what he deserves. Who gets into a car with a woman he's shamed out of wearing her glasses???? Not very bright.

Bowen herself was nearsighted (and like Emmeline in other ways), and you just know this sort of thing happened to her. I find it easy to imagine her connecting strongly with the highly subjective styles of James and Woolf, and developing her own murky, moody style to compensate for a lack of literal vision. But James's best metaphors (the pagoda, the ivory tower, the house of fiction) are elaborate and highly concrete, inviting you in for a long, pensive stroll. The outer world may have been vague to him, but his inner world is imagined in acute detail. There's one lengthy metaphor in To the North that has this quality, and I adored it. Surely it's no coincidence that it touches so closely on Bowen's actual experience. It's long but in the interest of ending on an upnote:

When a great house has been destroyed by fire--left with walls bleached and ghastly and windows gaping with the cold sky--the master has not, perhaps, the heart or the money to rebuild. Trees that were its companions are cut down and the estate sold up to the speculator. Villas spring up in red rows, each a home for someone, enticing brave little shops, radiant picture palaces: perhaps a park is left round the lake, where couples go boating. Lovers' lanes in asphalt replace the lonely green rides; the obelisk having no approaches is taken away. After dark--where once there was silence, a tree's shadow drawn slowly across the grass by the moon, or no moon, an exhalation of darkness--rows of windows come out like landerns in pink and orange; boxed in bright light hundreds of lives repeat their pattern; wireless picks up a tune from street to street. Shops stream light on the pavements, upon the commotion of late shopping; big buses swarm to the curb, small cars dart home to the garage, bicycling children flit through the birdless dark. Bright facades of cinemas reflect onto ingoing faces the expectation of pleasure: lovers laugh, gates click, doors swing, lights go on upstairs, couples lie down in honest beds. Life here is livable, kindly and sometimes gay; there is not a ghost of space or silence; the great house with its dominance and its radiation of avenues is forgotten. When spring is sweet in the air, snowdrops under the paling, when blue autumn blurs the trim streets' perspective or the low sun in winter dazzles the windows gold--something touches the heart, someone, disturbed pauses, hand on a villa gate. But not to ask: What was here?
With the quick fancy, the nerves and senses Cecilia could almost love. She enjoyed the repose of small intimacies, susceptibility she could command, reflections of passion momentarily commanded her. With her, the gay little streets flourished, but, brave when her house fell, she could not regain some entirety of the spirit. Disability seems a hard reward for courage.

[Jes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second reading (June 2017): Holy shiiiiiiit this book!!!!!! Why is it so good!!!! It’s so good!!!!! I have nothing eloquent to say about it right now, although I’ll have to find them somewhere in me for the dissertation chapter, but I think this is truly one of my favorite books, and the second read was even better than the (incredible, shocking, moving, ‘what the fuck!!!!’-inspiring first read). If I could write like anyone in the world I would want to write like Bowen—there’s something about her style, about the way she describes things and the strangeness of her syntax, that is just so creepy and fascinating and goooood. Also if I ever taught “The Literature of Bisexuality” this would absolutely be on the syllabus. There is sooooooooooooo much interesting stuff going on here!!!! All I can do is use a million exclamation points because I’ve got so many thoughts about it!!!! This book is also sort of pointedly not lesbian lit, in my mind? I see Bowen (and Mary Renault, too) as anti-Radclyffe Hall figures in a way, in that they're pointedly refusing an inversion model of sexuality, and they're both invested in depicting a specific kind of femme queerness that is often either absorbed back into straightness or read purely through the ‘closeted-lesbian-in-denial’ lens. ANYWAY, you should read this book, for many reasons but also because the ENDING (!!!!!!).

First reading (July 2014): This might be the best book I’ve read all year. It is a crying shame that Elizabeth Bowen is not more widely read, and I’m 100% ready to take up her literary apostleship. If you like Woolf, you will absolutely love Bowen. Her prose is just as gorgeous and her insights just as wrenching, but she’s also got something Woolf kind of lacks: the ability to tell a really good page-turner of a story. If you haven’t read Bowen before, this would be a great place to start, as the form is a little more traditional than some of her other novels—it’s got more of that (exceedingly British) “novel of manners” feel and less of the “experimental modernist” vibe.

[Amerynth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought Elizabeth Bowen's novel "To the North" was an okay book, but surely not good enough to merit a place on the list of 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die." I didn't get a lot out of the story-- it's the kind of book that are a dime a dozen these days, though maybe it was new and inventive in Bowen's day.

The story centers on two sisters-in-law, Cecilia, who was widowed a young age, and Emmeline, a woman with a head for business and the trials and tribulations of their love lives.

I felt both of the women were interesting characters, but the men they were surrounded by were really flat and uninteresting. The dialog seemed really stilted and there really didn't seem to be any connection between any of the characters. Perhaps that was the point. The book was okay, but nothing I'd urge someone else to read.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This might provoke a very interesting discussion in a reading group: starting with "what makes a novel endure?" To the North was written in the early 1930's and is still in print today. I suspect what makes it timeless is its stark portraiture of emotionally inaccessible characters.

For me, it is rare to read a book that doesn't have a single appealing character in it--but Bowen's people are frighteningly disengaged. I found the book absolutely chilling, but not in a way that drew me in---I am more fascinated by the fact that this book's appeal has survived nearly 60 years and that it continues to get very positive reviews. I really am curious as to why that's so.

[Louisa Fowler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather dated. Difficult to care about the characters or their futures as emotion is hidden throughout.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard on the heels of Muriel Spark's somewhat disturbing "The Driver's Seat" is the most disturbing of Bowen's books that I have read - one might even say melodramatic but sometimes a little drama is a nice contrast to a finely turned novel of manners.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen, an author in the genre of Virginia Wolfe and Dorothy Whipple, writes about English women’s lives in the 30’s and 40’s. In To the North we meet Cecelia, a young widow, and her younger, unmarried sister-in-law, Emmeline, who are living in London. Cecelia is a traditional woman heading towards another marriage but her restlessness and lack of direction make one question her purpose. Emmeline who runs a travel agency is more modern, but she takes risks that she may not be able to handle. Cecelia and Emmeline seem so close, but the question is , in a world where women’s lives are restricted and what is not said is often more important than what is, can they help each other.

I thought the book was over written. There were lots of metaphors, many of which I just didn’t get. At one point when Emmeline is having an argument with a boyfriend, I read: “She said ‘You are like an insurance company,’ and did not explain why.” I imagined some woman reading this in 30’s London and laughing wryly, having an exact image of what that meant. But metaphors can be dated and in a different time and culture I was perplexed. The story was interesting but there were too many of these perplexing moments for me to really like the book.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Letter (in this novel) from a man to a woman who loves him. They probably have been sexually intimate, but their language is so decorous and vague that their relationship seems to be distant even when they have slipped off to Paris together for a secret weekend. On the aeroplane, he writes her a note and HANDS IT to her:

"Or aren't you? These two days must be intolerable or perfect. You must know what I want; all I want. If I COULD marry, it would be you. I don't know if you know what this means. I don't think this could happen For God's sake, be kind to me. Understand?"

And she responds by doodling on the back of it. "She could not see at what point the issue had become apparent, from what point she was committed: committed, however, she felt."

I LIKED her character (Emmeline.) I even liked her awful housemate Cecilia: a monster of selfishness, but a soft little perfumed absurd monster.

But that letter and the conversations among all the characters that resemble it finally drove me wild with impatience, and I skipped ahead to the last chapter, where the ending irked me pretty thoroughly.

Then I sent the book back to the used bookstore whence it had come.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set mainly in London during the 1920’s To the North explores the lives of two young women, related by marriage. Recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her sister in law Emmeline share a house; they each rely on the presence of the other in the house though they live quite independently of each other. As the novel opens Cecilia is travelling across Europe by train, headed home to London and the house she shares with her husband’s sister. On the train Cecilia meets Mark Linkwater, a lawyer, who is presented as being almost, but not quite a gentleman, this meeting brings Linkwater into the lives of Cecilia and Emmeline, upsetting the balance of Emmeline’s quiet independent life. Markie (as he is called by everyone) is predatory, unreliable, worrying to everyone around Emmeline, and Emmeline more vulnerable to the limits he sets upon their relationship than she at first realises. Emmeline is drawn into a relationship with Markie, while Cecilia and Julian seem to dance around one another rather as Cecilia reconciles her past life with the one ahead of her.

Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/...

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emmeline and her dead brother's wife, Cecilia, share a residence in 1920's London. Cecilia, the young widow, is involved with Julian and apprehensively moves towards remarriage while the more naive, Emmeline, carries on a secret love affair with the brash Mark Linkwater. Bowen is a wordsmith; she draws out the subtleties of the small moments so beautifully that I found myself rereading sections just to enjoy them again.

[aris · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favourite bowen so far... which i am sure is soon to be usurped by yet another title since i keep getting very pleasantly surprised by her writing! this was a very unpredictable ride following the human psyche, and as always bowen's attention to detail when it comes to characterisation is incomparable