[In The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen there] are echoes of mystery … like reverberations after an explosion that has not itself been heard. It was part of [Elizabeth Bowen's] subtlety that she dealt so often and so confidently in such shadows, in the ghosts that lurk beneath mundane reality, and in the inaccessible….

There are echoes of another kind in Elizabeth Bowen's stories, pattering through even the most English of them. These are the tell-tale hints of the Irish mood….

Nationality matters in novels and short stories only when it makes itself felt, and Elizabeth Bowen now belongs less to Ireland than to literature. But any assessment of her work, especially of her stories, cannot quite escape the lost world into which, as a person, she was born at just the wrong time. As a writer, she took part of her strength from that predicament….

No story here...