Wrecked as Homeward She did Come: ‘Transposed Autobiography’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s Late Novel, The Little Girls

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Transposed autobiography
• intertextuality
• childhood and aging
• bereavement
• First World War
• Cuban Missile Crisis

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to both the Curtis Brown Group and the Durham University Library Archive for permission to quote from Elizabeth Bowen’s correspondence with William Plomer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Judith Woolf’s main research areas are twentieth century Italian-Jewish writers; life writing, especially in relation to the Holocaust; modernism and its predecessors; Victorian and early twentieth century women photographers; and narrative patterns in European literature. Her academic publications include Henry James: The Major Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1991), The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’ (Troubador, 2001), and translations of Natalia Ginzburg, The Things We Used to Say (Carcanet 1997: highly commended by the judges for the John Florio Prize), Francesca Duranti, The Little Girl (Troubador, 2010), Primo Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, Auschwitz Report (Verso 2006) and Auschwitz Testimonies 1945–1986 (Polity Press, in publication), and The Spaewife’s Prophecy (the Old Norse poem Vǫluspá) (Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, in publication). She is currently writing a monograph on Italian Jewish accounts of persecution and survival 1936–1945.