SOURCE: Suess, Barbara A. “When the Past Does Not Feed the Future: The ‘Idea of the Past’ in Three Bowen Stories.” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 9 (1997): 16-20.

In the following essay, Suess explores Bowen's preoccupation with the past in “Her Table Spread,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Hand in Glove.”

Elizabeth Bowen's Irish short stories, like her novels, commonly depict characters who perceive themselves as out-of-place. Feeling trapped by youth, in the country, as members of the degenerating Anglo-Irish gentry, Bowen's young women characters frequently express the desire, like Teresa in “A Love Story,” to go “away for ever” (53). However, these characters also aspire to be located in another time, as exhibited by their obsession with the “pasts” they encounter in stories, letters, and old trunks. More specifically, the stories “Her Table Spread,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Hand in Glove” portray characters whose unhappiness with the stagnant...