A Bequest of Her Own: The Reinvention of Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

complete the work before her death, she asked her agent and executor Spencer Curtis Brown to see that the book got published. On his visit to her in the hos pital, just before her death in February, 1973, she repeated her instructions.1 In these essays, Bowen attempts both to come to terms with her personal inheri tance, and to keep her literary reputation intact. It is here that she offered her comments on the critical studies emerging on her work: While appreciative of the honour done me and of the hard work involved, I have found some of them wildly off the mark. As if to complete the thought, she threw out a chal lenge that laid claim to anything anyone else might have to say about her or her writing: If anyone must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen? (PC 62). That claim is by now substantial: in the more than three decades since her death, her writing has spawned a remarkably wide range of reactions, both academic and popular. These responses?and Bowens anticipation of them? touch on a central conundrum of literary criticism: how does the writer influ ence what is said or not said about her? In posterity, Bowens reputation has bat tled with the lingering perception of her as a 'minor' figure whose work is most often read as a charming but dated embodiment of traditional literary and social values.2 Her work has lingered in a state of critical ambivalence, not unlike the one she herself inhabited. Writing of what happens to a book after it has been published, she describes the cable between the author and her words being cut; thereafter, the work embarks upon an unforeseeable life of its