SOURCE: Coates, John. “The Misfortunes of Eva Trout.” Essays in Criticism 48, no. 1 (January 1998): 59-79.

In the following essay, Coates finds that the usual interpretation of the ending of Eva Trout is a misreading of the work's explicit textual clues.

The respectful reviews given to Eva Trout on its appearance in 1969 were not endorsed by subsequent critics of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. ‘Elizabeth ended by parodying herself’, letting ‘her mannered manner run away with her’¹ was Patricia Craig's view, while for Hermione Lee the book was ‘an illustration of Elizabeth Bowen's late malaise’ and ‘an unfocussed and bizarre conclusion to her opus’.² Such comments attribute the novel's aesthetic failure to a willed technical incompetence on the part of a distinguished writer engaged in a perverse experiment, a botched and belated attempt to remake herself in changing times. For Hermione Lee, Bowen's last novel's ‘unhappy struggle with its own language and...