SOURCE: "The Past Is a Burning Pattern: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September," in Éire-Ireland, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 40-54.

In the following essay, Lassner examines the Anglo-Irish myth of the ancestral home in The Last September, focusing on the narcissim, false privelege, and fatalism it fosters.

Although Elizabeth Bowen's Anglo-Irish background has been acknowledged as a powerful influence on her fiction, scant attention has been given to The Last September, the novel which deals most directly with the political and social forces that shaped her life and creative vision. Bowen sets the novel during the Troubles at Danielstown, an Anglo-Irish country estate greatly resembling Bowen's Court, her ancestral home in County Cork. Moreover, the last days of the big house clearly rely on Bowen's appraisal of the Ascendancy. The Ascendancy, in Bowen's view of her family history, "drew [its] power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong...