[Elizabeth Bowen] wrote with originality, bounty, vigor, style, beauty up to the last….

["The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen"] makes several new pleasures possible…. To see anew these bright stars set among their own constellations, to read again "Mysterious Kôr" in company with "Summer Night," "The Happy Autumn Fields," "Ivy Gripped the Steps" and "The Demon Lover" is to experience in its full force that concentration of imaginative power which was hers.

We can gain, too, a truer perception of its nature. Her work was in very close affinity with its time and place, as we know….

In "Her Table Spread," we're at a dinner party in a remote Irish castle overlooking an estuary on a rainy night; in the estuary is the rare sight of a visiting English destroyer…. A whole welcoming world is being made out of that wet, lonely, amorous Irish night.

They are...