( 2 3 ) B e t w e e n t h e W a r s F i c t i o n I I
(Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, Henry Green and Ford Madox Ford)
T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y
[See Topic 13]
T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y F i c t i o n
[See Topic 15]
E l i za b e t h B o w e n ( 1 8 9 9 – 1 9 7 3 )
L i f e :
- b. and spent her childhood in Ir. (Bowen’s Court) x but: settled in En.
W o r k :
The Last September (1929):
- = her early novel
- conc.: the tensions in the history of her landed family, the divided loyalties of the increasingly dispossessed Protestant Ascendancy in Ir.
The Death of the Heart (1938):
- = her most Jamesian novel
- set in the En. of 1930s
- conc.: the loss of innocence in the face of shallow sophistication and the glamour of metropolitan values
Bowen’s Court (1942):
- = her memoir
- conc.: the life in Ir. ó her The Last September
Look at all those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover (1945):
- = coll. of short stories
The Heat of the Day (1949):
- = her masterpiece novel
- conc.: London and Londoners changing, adjusting, and adapting under the impact of the Blitz
- an upper-class Ir. woman’s perception of the Br. ‘Home Front’
- a finely tuned stylistic tact in deploying and using detail: the lovers meet in the ‘heady autumn of the first London air raids’, and Stella puts down her failure to notice the limp of the invalid Robert ‘to the general rocking of London and one’s own mind’, etc.
- = symbolic meanings: R.’s disability, the urban unease, the strangeness, the headiness
- concl.: R. turns out to be an enemy spy, a betrayer both of an allegiance to Br. and of the partly bemused, partly detached S. herself
- x the Anglo-Ir. S. and her soldier son maintain the allegiance to Br.
The Little Girls (1964):
- = her penultimate novel
- conc.: the sometimes painful difference btw the perceptions of children x adults
J o y c e C a r y ( 1 8 8 8 - 1 9 5 7 )
"The First Trilogy":
- follows 3 characters at the end of their lives
- each of the novels is narrated by one of the characters
- each of them fails to fulfil their personal objectives due to the conflicting elements in their personalities
(1) Herself Surprised (1941):
- narrated by a country girl, lover to both other M protagonists
- seeks upward mobility x but: her appetite for life causes her to lose her home and status
(2) To be a Pilgrim (1942):
- narrated by a staid conservator of the past, dedicated to preserving the family fortune
- seeks to become "a pilgrim" x but: his conservatism prevents him from leaving his restricted life
(3) The Horse's Mouth (1944):
- = one of the most strikingly affirmative and orig. novels of the war years
- narrated by a Blake-obsessed painter, unconventional and unsentimental
- seeks to lose himself in creation x but: only one of his paintings (an unfinished one) is preserved
- he paints a mural of the Creation on a threatened wall, indifferent both to its prospective demolition by the war and to his approaching death
- concl.: on his deathbed he thanks God for "the final beauty of a wall" and equates prayers with a full and lusty enjoyment of life
- a footnote to the novel: the wall with the mural was demolished
"The Second Trilogy"
- the author was dissatisfied with his First Trilogy > began another one
- conc.: politics and its background
- in style similar to his First Trilogy: 3 novels narrated by 3 characters, 1 woman and her 2 lovers
(1) Prisoner of Grace (1952), (2) Except the Lord (1954), (3) Not Honour More (1955)
H e n r y G r e e n ( 1 9 0 5 - 7 3 )
- = the pseudonym of Henry Vincent Yorke, son of a wealthy Birmingham industrialist
- < infl. by his domestic circumstances during WW I when the family house became a convalescent home for wounded officers
- < the attempted suicide of one of the officers, his brother's death, "the lists of the dead each day in every paper" => reinforced in him an acute awareness of morality
Living (1929):
- = his masterpiece
- conc.: the commonplace rhythms, repetitions and deprivations of Birmingham factory life
- style: highly abbreviated, eliminates definite articles and adjectives, experiments with verbless sentences
- the son of a factory owner reflects on a way of life monotonous for all classes the same: being born, going to school, working, being married, bearing children and dying
- a brief interruption of the monotony: an exploited girl attempts to escape to Canada with her lover x but: returns to the routines of her life in Birmingham on finding out that she was not happy as she expected
Party Going (1939):
- conc.: a young and smart set of party goers is delayed in their train journey for several hours by fog
- the group resort to the station hotel and look down on the masses of less privileged travellers below them
- their trivial gossip is glancingly overshadowed by the sudden illness of one girl of the group and by the raised subject of an air raid
Loving (1945):
- conc.: the neutral Ireland
F o r d M a d o x F o r d ( 1 8 7 3 – 1 9 3 9 )
L i f e :
- b. Ford Hermann Hueffer
W o r k :
- founded The English Review (1908) publ.:
(a) establ. writers: T. Hardy, A. Bennett, H. G. Wells, H. James, & oth.
(b) new writers: the 1st to publ. poems by D. H. Lawrence, & oth.
- founded The Transatlantic Review (1920s) publ. modern(ist) lit.
The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903):
- in collab. with J. Conrad
The Fifth Queen (1907 – 8):
- = a decoratively ornate trilogy of historical novels
- conc.: Catherine Howard (1520/-25 – 42, the beheaded wife of Henry VIII [1491 – 1547, reign 1509 – 47])
The Critical Attitude (1911):
- = a series of polemical essays on the state of the novel
- orig. publ. in the English Review
- contrasts the ‘loose, amorphous, genial and easy-going’ Br. novel of Henry Fielding (1707 – 54, author of Tom Jones (1749)], C. Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, A. Trollope, & oth. x the tighter and more self-consciously artful Fr. novel
- praises H. James and J. Conrad for their ‘great attention to their Art’
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915):
- = his fictional masterpiece
- provisionally entitled The Saddest Story x but: The Good Soldier a doubtlessly more appropriate title for a novel to appear in wartime
- a pre-Modernist technique:
Ø Conradian shifts in time and perceptions of betrayal
Ø Jamesian conc. with the subtleties of overlapping relationships and emotions
- x but: the ambiguous Am. relater John Dowell at times reveals a knowing awareness of the arbitrary nature of is narration
Parade’s End (1924 – 28):
- = a post-war tetralogy incl. Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928)
- conc.: the gradual break-up of the traditional squirearchical values
- continues his exploration behind the disciplined and gentlemanly façade of the characters
- the protagonist = an unhappy lover, a largely unsuccessful soldier, and neurotic survivor after the war’s end
- begins his post-war career as a restorer of antiques x but: still tries to make sense of the battered old world, now essentially fragmented
Ø also wrote: a biography of his grandfather (1896) Ford Madox Brown (1821 – 93, a painter)