SOURCE: Hooper, Brad. “Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’: A Dream or Not?” Studies in Short Fiction 21, no. 2 (spring 1984): 151-53.

In the following essay, Hooper offers an alternate interpretation of the dreamlike action of “The Happy Autumn Fields.”

Elizabeth Bowen states in the Preface to Ivy Gripped the Steps, and Other Stories that in “The Happy Autumn Fields,” “a woman is projected from flying-bombed London, with its day-and-night eeriness, into the key emotional crisis of a Victorian girlhood,”¹ indicating the woman is dreaming or hallucinating, that the Victorian girlhood into which she is thrown is strictly unreal. Indeed, that had been the standard critical interpretation of “The Happy Autumn Fields.” Such an interpretation, however, constitutes a misreading of what Bowen actually produced in the story.

It opens with a family, at a time when “skirts [were] gathered up and carried clear of the ground,”² out for a walk...