Elizabeth Bowen

I suppose this entry could have been placed in my literature blog, it does, after all, concern a writer. A writer, furthermore, which I am currently engaging with using all my available learning. But the inspiration for this text, my thoughts, are about my relationship with this person, who, right now, is a very strong presence in my life.

Apart from watching football, reading news, going to the gym and seeing the odd friend here and there my life right now is taken up by my academic endeavours. And it strikes me how close a relationship I am forming with the woman whose texts I have decided to make my study. Well, not the actual woman, of course, she died 6 years before I was born. Rather my own idea about her, the persona of Elizabeth Bowen which emerges for me through her texts. I've read most of her fiction, her essays, prefaces and a few letters and without really noticing the process I feel as though I know her voice. Know, even, what she would think about certain things and feel gratified when a new text confirms this. This is of course nonsense, I am only conversing with myself and my ideas about someone who might as well be fictional for all I am able to know. Surely we can never "get to know" the dead by reading their texts?

Somehow, though, I think we do form relationships with people that we study; it seems to be a part of human behaviour to form relationships with all kinds of things apart from other human beings. Pets, objects, football teams... all take on a significance of their own, we invest them with importance and they ARE important, because they are important to us. Their characteristics interact with our feelings for them and relationships are formed. As a student or researcher of literature, this becomes an inevitable outcome of the close examination of someone else's texts and contexts. To be able to sustain one's work and enthusiasm about it maybe it is necessary to have a good relationship with one's chosen object of study. By good I don't necessarily mean a loving one, battling can undoubtedly be fruitful too. I personally, however, need to love and respect the person I am devoting myself too and I find in Elizabeth Bowen a writer with whom I could continue to work for many years yet without getting bored or frustrated.

Bowen herself explored the ghostly nature of texts, people, the past and memory; how the fictional can be as real as the actual, and how our senses of self and our senses of each other are subjective and complicated. Her wisdom in these matters is something that I find myself respecting, just as I respect and love to study how she treated all these subjects in her fiction. Examining Elizabeth Bowen’s writing has given me much food for thought about literature itself and why and how we interact with it.

The work that I am doing now, of which a dissertation on Bowen is to be the outcome, began with Henry James, on the back of a longer involvement with Virginia Woolf. Fascinated by their fiction I also studied some of their other writing. And while they will never cease to amaze me, for all kinds of reasons, I never felt a connection, never felt that I wanted to throw my lot in with either of them for a longer period of time. At times, they even annoyed me a little. Elizabeth and I will have our disagreements, inevitably, but I feel that this is but the beginning of a beautiful friendship.