[Reading The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen] we are aware of steady progress, of increasing mastery of the form….

Her earliest stories (Encounters, 1923, and Ann Lee's, 1926,) were exercises in observation, rounded out by guesswork; she noted mannerisms and imagined their sources or followed up their implications. Her characters are meek, pompous, put-upon, confused, or contrite. She evokes gaiety only to undercut it with an ironic repudiation of its shallowness. Mockery, "the small smile of one who, herself, knows better," is never too far away. She is hardest on the arch, the effusive, and those who would attribute to themselves a "fearful" sensitivity; and this denotes an essential soundness of outlook, which made a firm base for the experiments in intricacy she carried out later. Emotional indecorum always affronted her.

Her own terse judgement of Encounters and Ann Lee's—"a blend of precosity and naïveté"—will not, I...