‘Always Coming and Going’: The In-Between Spaces of Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Novels

Abstract

As an Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen’s own sense of home, and the location of her national identity, is uncertain. In a recent essay on the author, Vera Kreilkamp refers to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a colonial class uneasily suspended […] between a British and an Irish identity’ (2009: 13). Hermione Lee also comments on Bowen’s ‘particularly acute form of the Anglo-Irish split between confidence and ambivalence, the sense of dislocation and ali-enness’ (1999: 16), intensified by what was, in Bowen’s own words, a ‘cleft between my heredity and my environment’ (1986: 23). Neither English nor Irish, but a hybrid of both, Bowen does not belong to either country, existing instead in an unstable, liminal sphere between the two. Following Maud Ellmann’s claim that ‘the sense of homelessness so prevalent in Bowen’s fiction derives at least in part from the predicament of the Anglo-Irish, an alien enclave marooned in its own home’ (2004: 10), this chapter maintains that, accordingly, her novels explore themes of belonging and exile by foregrounding such in-between, transitory spaces as the Parisian salon/waiting room, the seaside town and the hotel, as well as the ‘doorsteps, docks and platforms’ (Bowen [1935] 1998a: 121) that litter her work. Through an emphasis on the impermanence of such locations, and through recurring contrasts between these and the apparently stable environments of the home, Bowen compels her readers to reconsider the very concept of home, and what it means to belong.

Someone remarked, Bowen characters are almost perpetually in transit. […] I agree, Bowen characters are in transit consciously.

(Bowen 1986: 286, original emphasis)