Now available in paperback

With Ritchie, Bowen kept up a brave front despite the sadness of widowhood and the associated shortage of money, which obliged her to produce journalism at a titanic rate. Elsewhere in her writing of this time, as Allan Hepburn notes, the theme of disappointment preoccupied her ‘as a subject of psychological, even psychoanalytic, proportions’. In one of the best of the previously uncollected essays and articles in People, Places, Things she talks, the year after Cameron’s death, of the corrosive effects of slow disappointment, of disappointment as ‘a sort of process – going all the deeper because it has acted slowly’. It was in friendships, marriages and love affairs, she suggested, that one most risked this undermining loss of hope. ‘There is danger of becoming that sad type, the recognisably “disappointed” person – condoned with, but liable to be shunned.’ Appropriately enough, and not surprisingly, given its meditative and melancholy tone, the article, which had been commissioned by Reader’s Digest, was rejected. Like the essay on Jane Austen from 1936 and the occasional piece, ‘Calico Windows’, written to help raise funds for the rebuilding of Soho after the Blitz, ‘Disappointment’ is a small masterpiece in an uneven collection. Some of the writing is slight and some goes over ground, such as the history of Bowen’s Court and London in wartime, that she covered better elsewhere. A worthwhile addition to Bowen’s oeuvre, this is not the place to start with her non-fiction. Yet, even in the least of these pieces, there is vitality. Of Austen she wrote that her ‘two twin orders, Elegance and Propriety’ were the key to her greatness, going on to add that these are qualities ‘one would be prepared, in the last resort, to die for, that one would be prepared, at least, to sacrifice a life to’.

(LRB 9 April 2009)

Edinburgh | hardback 467 pp. |ISBN: 9780748635689