Re-reading Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen's own obsession with returns and re-readings is summed up in her 1961 'Foreword' to Afterthought, a collection of pieces which go back to the 1940s. There are many scenes of reading and re-reading in the novels and stories of Bowen, and the negotiation over who owns the past that goes on in so many of those scenes can be applied to the ways in which this great novelist of the twentieth century has been read and re-read. Her reputation shifts, her readings change: she refuses to be fixed or finished with. 'The enforced return' is an alarming phrase, and very suggestive, even for a professed anti-Freudian like Bowen, of the return of the repressed. The chapter concludes with two 'acts of reading' in Bowen that embody most dramatically the past's sometimes unwelcome pressure on the present, and the question of the ownership of the past.

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