SOURCE: Coates, John. “The Recovery of the Past in A World of Love.” Renascence 40, no. 4 (summer 1988): 226-46.

In the following essay, Coates disputes critics who characterize A World of Love as a “lovely” novel with little substance, contending that the work deals with some of the most significant concerns of twentieth-century life.

It has often been suggested, quite correctly, that A World of Love (1955) recapitulates themes familiar from Elizabeth Bowen's earlier novels such as the nature and power of innocence and the awakening of an inexperienced girl to worldly knowledge or possibly to worldly corruption. There is also agreement on a second and much more disputable point. One of the book's first reviewers, Rose Macaulay, talked of its “feathery and oblique feminine portraiture” and denied that it had a topic or a theme since its author was “far more tentative than that” (132). Patricia Craig's recent study echoes this...