Bowen, The Bell, and the Late-Modernist Short Story

Abstract

This essay looks at Elizabeth Bowen's presence in The Bell during the war years. She contributed an essay, a short story, two pieces of memoir, two obituaries, and a few other, smaller pieces to the magazine, but also featured in an interview, several reviews, and O'Faoláin's editorials and critical essays. Yet, as a Protestant, Anglo-Irish woman writer living in England, Bowen was in many ways an odd presence in The Bell, which squarely focused on Irish life and Irish writing. While O'Faoláin's mission to present an inclusive view of Ireland may explain his publication of Bowen's autobiographical essays, her prominence as a fiction writer can better be accounted for through her achievements in the modern short story, the genre O'Faoláin sought to promote as a central Irish literary form in The Bell. Indeed, although Bowen's short stories have been classified as ‘modernist’ and O'Faoláin's as ‘realist’, their aesthetics of the short story are remarkably similar. Still, The Bell’s championing of Bowen's short fiction as a model to follow was undermined by its framing of Bowen as an ‘aristocratic’ writer whose literary snapshots of Irish life had a peculiarly dated and blinkered quality.