Wrecked as Homeward She did Come
‘Transposed Autobiography’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s Late Novel, The Little Girls
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12648337 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Judith Woolf (University of York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 227-241 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Life Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1448-4528 • E-ISSN: 1751-2964 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291290 |
| OpenAlex | W2593784178 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
Long overshadowed by the great gothic edifice of her final work, Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen’s unjustly neglected late novel, The Little Girls, engages, like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with the unbearable impact on its author of family trauma and her mother’s early death, and with the ambiguities of her adult sexual identity, and does so (like Woolf again), both through a network of literary references and quotations and through an exploration of the impact of world war on private lives. The novel’s departure from its author’s classic style has too often caused it to be dismissed as contrived or banal even by some of Bowen’s most perceptive critics. I should like to offer an alternative reading of the coldly comic masking of pain and loss which makes The Little Girls both so funny and so disconcerting, and thus to restore it to its rightful place in the Bowen canon
Art · Art history · Biography · Comics · Literature · Menagerie · Psychoanalysis · Style (visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History · Irish and British Studies · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |