As a writer, Bowen must be evaluated on the basis of about a dozen stories and five novels—The Last September, To The North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and The Heat of the Day. (A case could be made, too, for The Little Girls.)… On the basis of her fiction alone, Bowen is as good as Evelyn Waugh, better than Ivy Compton-Burnett, Graham Greene or Henry Green. Her novels yield to Woolf's in visionary intensity but are superior to them in formal construction, variety of subject, and moral force.

Bowen is below the greatest novelists—Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy, James, Proust—but like them she reflected constantly and profoundly on the nature of fiction. So much so, that the "laws" of fiction came to constitute a metaphorical system for her, used in the novels themselves sometimes to help present the action…. (p. 619)

It...