SOURCE: "Elizabeth Bowen; or, Romance Does Not Pay," in The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956, pp. 167-90.

In the following excerpt, O'Faolain asserts that Bowen's writing was influenced by her Anglo-Irish background and its accompanying sense of exile. O'Faolain also considers Bowen's relationship to the French novelist and short story writer Gustave Flaubert and discusses Bowen as a romantic in an anti-romantic age.

Elizabeth Bowen is detached by birth from that society she describes. She is an Irishwoman, at least one sea apart from English traditions. She descends from that sturdy and creative sub-race we call the Anglo-Irish. At least a part of her literary loyalties are with that long and honourable pedigree that goes back through Shaw, Joyce, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, Yeats, Wilde, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, Swift and Berkeley to the forced marriage of two races, two islands….

The effects...