Category Archives: Anglo-Irish

Some Short Stories by Elizabeth Bowen – Mrs Windermere – The Demon Lover – A Day in the Dark

Posted in Anglo-Irish, Books by

Bowen,_Elizabeth

In the foreword to her Elizabeth Bowen biography, Elizabeth Glendinning names what she thinks are Elizabeth Bowen’s best short stories:

The Disinherited

A Summer Night

Mysterious Kôr

The Happy Autumn Fields

Ivy Gripped the Steps

A Day in the Dark

 Mysterious Kôr is the first story I read by Bowen and it’s really an amazing story. I read and reviewed Summer Night last year. Unlike so many other short stories I’ve read over the course of a year it has stayed with me or, to be more precise, it’s atmosphere and imagery have stayed with me. The story is somewhat blurred by now. For this year’s Irish Short Story Month I decided to read three stories, each belonging to another chapter in the Collected Stories. Mrs Windermere is among the first stories. The Demon Lover is one of the wartime stories and A Day in the Dark is a post-war story.

When you read Bowen you will always find similarities in all of her stories whether she wrote them early in her career or later. The three stories I’ve read are very different but in each you will find lush atmospherical descriptions and a strong emphasis on emotions and mood. There is also an element of mystery in all three of them. A lot is only hinted at, remains a secret. A Day in the Dark, the most complex of these stories adds something new. It has a strong  metafictional element.

Mrs Windermere is the most playful of the three stories. The mystery lies in the character of Mrs Windermere, an elderly independent single woman who meets a young married woman in the streets. They spent some time together in Italy. The young woman is fascinated and intimidated by Mrs Windermere. Mrs Windermere seems to see through people, reads their lives in the palms of their hands. Not only is she very outspoken, she seems to question the way the young woman lives. Why having married if you could have been free? is what she seems to ask. She senses that the young woman’s life is missing something and tempts her to explore something new, maybe have an affair. A very feminist story for its time.

The Demon Lover combines a ghost story with the depiction of war-time London. The result is uncanny. Imagine there is a war and you flee the city, leaving everything behind; your house, your possessions. One afternoon you’re back in London and go to your abandoned house to pick up some things. The house has a ghostly feel, nobody has been there for a long time and it is surrounded by house ruins and other abandoned places. You go from room to room as if you were walking not only through your house but through the life you’ve left behind. And suddenly, someone from you distant past reappears.

After having read The Demon Lover I understand why all of Bowen’s war-time stories set in London are either ghost stories or stories with a ghostly feel. Those abandoned houses exude a great loneliness and seem to be creatures waiting for their life to resume.

The narrator of A Day in the Dark looks back on her teenage years and tells a story that took place one afternoon, a long time ago. She was a young girl, living with her uncle. She has a crush on him and their relationship is very close. It’s never said that they are having an affair but the possibility of it is palpable. On that afternoon she visits a rich woman. She has to give her back magazines her uncle has borrowed. The woman hints at things the young girl doesn’t understand.

It’s a very complex, and multilayered story. The characters are revealed through small hints and descriptions. The way it is written is meta-fictional as the narrator intrudes, points out what could have been described and remembered otherwise.

A Day in the Dark is a very dense and mysterious story. Reading it was like eating an exotic fruit for the first time. It’s nice but so strange that one wonders continuously whether one really likes it and why and tries to put into words how it tastes. It’s one of those short stories you could read again and again and would still have unanswered questions, new possible interpretations. I loved it.

This post is a contribution to Mel’s Irish Short Story Month.

Molly Keane: Two Days in Aragon (1941)

Posted in Anglo-Irish, Books, Literature, Novel by

Grania and Sylvia Fox live in the Georgian house of Aragon, with their mother, their Aunt Pidgie and Nan O’Neill, the family nurse. Attending Aragon’s strawberry teas, the British Army Officers can almost forget the reason for their presence in Ireland. But the days of dignified calm at Aragon are numbered.

I first read about Molly Keane’s Two Days in Aragon on Danielle’s blog. Molly Keane or M.J. Farrell, the pseudonym under which she published her books,  is one of Danielle’s reading projects and after having read Two Days in Aragon I can understand why. I’m trying to put into words what type of book this was but nothing I come up with seems to do it justice. Molly Keane captured beautifully the end of an area, portrayed a social system, drew complex character portraits and incorporated such a wide variety of topics that I’m full of admiration.

I love descriptions of big old houses. They seem to have a life of their own and their majestic presence can be felt so strongly, they are almost characters in their own right. Aragon is exactly such a house. The family home of the Fox’s is grand, old and full of history. There are hidden rooms and the ghosts of the ancestors seem to be hovering around. But Aragon is also a symbol. A symbol for a way of life about to end. Aragon also symbolizes oppression as it is the house of an Anglo-Irish family and as such represents everything that the Irish have come to hate and against which they are fighting in 1920, the year in which the novel takes place.

The end of an era can be brought by many things but war, rebellion, change of government are among the most frequent. All over the world when the colonized stand up against the colonists this signifies the end of a life in beauty and ease for the formerly advantaged. Molly Keane knew very well what she wrote about as she came from such a rich Anglo-Irish family who lived in privilege and never had to work. They loved their horses and hunting and eating well. All this was incorporated into the novel. The descriptions of these two days make one long to have been there, to have experienced the rituals, seen the beauty.

Molly Keane offers more than the description of a house and a way of life about to end. One thing I liked a lot in the novel were the characters. None of them likable, maybe with one exception (Sylvia), but all of them are drawn so vividly and in all their complexity that I was glued to the page.

Grania and Sylvia Fox live in the grand old house together with their mother and Aunt Pidgie. Their father has died after a hunting accident. Grania and Sylvia are very different which is also shown in their choice of men. Grania has an affair with Foley O’Neill, a socially unacceptable choice, while Sylvia is secretly in love with a British officer. One girl is described as a slutty, fat, blond and the other as a neat, groomed and very poised young lady. The mother has a bit of both of them but seems to like her passionate, wilder and slutty daughter far more.

Aunt Pidgie and Nan O’Neill, the house nurse, form a duo. Aunt Pidgie is an unwelcome elderly relative that is kept, far away, in the nursery. This reminded me of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. The unwanted, especially women, were often locked away. Aunt Pidgie is a bit crazy but inoffensive. In the beginning we know nothing of her sufferings but when we learn more about Nan O’Neill and her well-hidden side of aggression and cruelty we start to pity this poor bird-like little woman. Nan O’Neill is the most complex and fascinating character. She loves Aragon and everything in it with a fierceness and as if it did belong to her. This has a reason. She is an impressive woman, commanding, extremely good-looking and adept at everything. She is especially good at hiding her true nature. Disappointment and lack of love have made her cruel and pitiless. In her role as nurse she is one of the most powerful characters in the novel. She knows about unwanted pregnancies and how to end them, about subtle ways how to torture someone in keeping them alive but constantly uncomfortable. A very chilling character.

I have read a lot of novels about the end of an era, many have houses in their center. I loved Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as much as E.M.Forster’s Howard’s End and of course,  Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi Contini. They are often nostalgic and melancholic books. This isn’t the case here, Two Days in Aragon is completely different in tone and although tragedy strikes all of them I wasn’t sad after reading it but rather full of admiration for Molly Keane and her very unique voice and fascinating approach to tell her story.  And I felt exhausted. She is such a vivid storyteller, I lived in those pages, I almost felt as if I had experienced two very intense days.