SOURCE: Jordan, Heather Bryant. “Fictional Silences.” In How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, pp. 153-68. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Jordan explores Bowen's treatment of the psychological trauma of life during wartime in her postwar novel The Heat of the Day.

War, if you come to think of it, hasn't started anything that wasn't already there.

—Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

The novel that emerged from Bowen's immersion in the Second World War epitomized “a state of living in which events assault the imagination.” In The Heat of the Day, Bowen depicts the psychological ramifications of the changed landscape of war, as she had in the short stories which were “unconscious sketches” for this novel.¹ This fiction shows her tackling in a more sustained, and sometimes more agonized, manner the same questions she had...