SHORT STORIES:A FEW, VERY FEW, novelists make even better short-story writers, and Elizabeth Bowen's extensive body of shorter fiction establishes her as one of the most important practitioners of the form in the 20th century.
Initially, Bowen made her name with collections of short stories published from the early 1920s onwards, the most celebrated being her compelling, uncanny stories of the London Blitz, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945). To date, the definitive volume of her collected stories has been Angus Wilson's 1980 edition, where he assembled all of her books - including The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934) and Look at All Those Roses (1941) and others - into one publication.
However, it is clear from the online catalogue of her archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin that Bowen also wrote many other short stories for newspapers and magazines throughout her working life. Now, in The Bazaar and Other Stories, Allan Hepburn reproduces these other magazine stories in an annotated edition, and his valuable work of scholarship completes the availability of Bowen's shorter fictions. Using Bowen's extensive literary archive, Hepburn has tracked down those stories from publications such as the Sunday Times, Tatler, Vogue, and Woman's Day.
His scholarly detective work is accompanied by extensive annotations and a very useful introduction, and, in addition, he has reproduced a number of Bowen's unpublished stories.
Introducing The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories in 1936, Bowen argued that: "The story should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric; it should magnetise the imagination and give pleasure - of however disturbing, painful or complex a kind." Many of the stories collected here have that lyrical spontaneity. In each of these stories, we re-encounter familiar Bowen territory: the demesne of the Anglo-Irish Big House, the villas and guest houses of the Home Counties, the bleak landscape of wartime England. The fairy tale The Unromantic Princess was commissioned from Bowen in 1935 for The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book, a fund-raiser for the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital for Children, and reveals an unexpected and rather touching affinity with another Anglo-Irish writer of children's fables, Oscar Wilde.
Bowen's perspective on the fate of the Anglo-Irish in the 20th century is, arguably, the most influential, and The Good Earl, written in 1946, is a feudal tale of a well-meaning but self-deluding landlord. The republication of this story alone makes the volume worthwhile, as it provides a valuable companion piece to her celebrated story of the Anglo-Irish in decline, Her Table Spread. The Lost Hope, published in 1946 in the Sunday Times, is a wartime story, where a successful, somewhat smug, male writer receives a manuscript written by a young soldier, now dead, a chillingly poignant moment of connection from beyond the grave. Her Christmas stories can sometimes reveal an unwelcome sentimentality, unusual for Bowen, particularly Candles in the Window, written for the December 1958 edition of Woman's Day, or the coming-of-age story Happiness.
Happily, other unpublished Christmas tales, such as the mid-1950s Christmas Games and Home for Christmas are tinged with a satisfyingly Gothic flavour. Bowen's profound interest in the uncanny also surfaces in The Claimant, published first in Vogue in 1955. Here, a devoted couple buy an old house overlooking an estuary, only to find their ownership disputed by an Australian nephew of the previous owner. The disgruntled claimant's desire to dislodge them becomes even stronger after his death in an aircraft crash, and the climax of the story is as disturbing as anything Bowen has written elsewhere.
THE UNPUBLISHED STORIES are, for the most part, as good as the published ones; it seems as if Bowen was incapable of writing a dull short story. In his introduction, Allan Hepburn writes, "In this volume, finished and unfinished stories alike display Bowen's fierce control over materials. Authorial control does not preclude the disarray into which a story can throw a reader's expectations . . . Stories continue to resonate after they end because they locate funds of unexpended feeling within the reader". Many of these stories have this continued resonance, these funds of unexpended feeling and, overall, the republication of these important Bowen stories will add greatly to her literary reputation.
Eibhear Walshe lectures in the department of English, University College, Cork. He is the editor of a collection of critical essays on Elizabeth Bowen to be published by Irish Academic Press
The Bazaar and Other Stories: Elizabeth Bowen. Edited by Allan Hepburn Edinburgh University Press, 344pp £50