SOURCE: Bates, Judith. “Undertones of Horror in Elizabeth Bowen's Look at All Those Roses and The Cat Jumps.” Journal of the Short Story in English 8 (spring 1987): 81-91.

In the following essay, Bates elucidates the role of horror in Bowen's “Look at All Those Roses” and “The Cat Jumps.”

It is surely the heritage of horror indissociable from Ireland's past that has left its stamp on Irish writers, many of whom have themselves lived through atrocities and all aware of them through family annals or the history of their country.

As regards the background in which Elizabeth Bowen sets two stories pervaded by undertones of horror, “Look at All Those Roses” and “The Cat Jumps,” it should be remembered that she is a writer of Irish stock transplanted to a non-Celtic country at the age of seven, and, therefore influenced in different ways by heredity and environment. Such a...