I read A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen for Reading Ireland Month 2023, during the week of Classics at Cathy’s 746Books.
O’Brien versus Bowen, A Fair Comparison?
Having just read and loved Edna O’Brien’s trilogy The Country Girls, written a mere 5 years later than this novella, I thought I would easily get through this. They lived in the same country and both wrote in the English language, however they were worlds apart in their use of language, their choice of protagonist and place.
There is a 30 year difference in age, but while O’Brien writes with lucidity and frankness (too frank for many, thus her work was initially banned) Bowen writes with unfathomable verbiage that obfuscates the narrative and left me wondering what this had been about.
A World of Love? I think not.
War Changes Everything
A young man who would have owned a grand Anglo-Irish house, inconveniently dies in World War I, leaving a fiance Lilia, who sadly has no status having not yet married him, and a cousin Antonia, who will inherit the mansion. Needing a farm worker to run the place and perhaps feeling sorry for Lilia, Antonia brings these two together, they marry and have two girls, Jane and Maud.
One summer 20-year-old Jane pokes around the attic and discovers a bundle of letters folded into an old dress. There are a few conversations that circle the letters, though rarely address them – which is a little like the tone of the novel, people speak and avoid all the issues.
The Importance of Community
Photo by Y. Koppens on Pexels.com
There is an annual festival, which should be a day of excitement, and for Jane it is, but it is the only community event the family ever participate in, they are isolated and out of touch with the everyday reality of other lives, living in the shadow of the past, of a future that never manifested.
Ultimately, we learn that this family, like the muslin dress and the letters folded away in it, are living a life suspended between the past and the present, one that Jane, who is in the peak of her youth, clearly wants to bust out of. Her finding the dress and the letters is a sign of much needed change, something that disrupts the stagnant air of an old house, arrested in time.
Times Pass, Youth Reinvents the Present
When Jane descends wearing the musty, antique dress, a symbol of the past, Antonia gestures for it to be taken away, while Jane insists the presence of the sachets suggest it was meant to be worn again.
‘No, on the contrary – no, it had had its funeral. Delicious hour for somebody, packing away her youth. Last looks at it, pangs, perhaps tears even. Then down with the lid!’
‘What, does youth really end with a bang, like that?’
‘It used to. Better if it still did.’
Antonia, as so often, spoke into nothing – for Jane, not awaiting the answer to her idle question, had got back up and gone to the looking-glass. There she stood, back turned to the bed, searching impersonally for the picture Antonia had failed to care to find or for the meaning of the picture, without which there could be no picture at all. ‘What egotists the dead seem to be,’ she said. ‘This summery lovely muslin not to be worn again, because she could not? Why not imagine me?’ She stepped back on to a flounce of the hem, which tore. ‘Who’d she have been? she wondered, roping the fullness round her to see the damage.
Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com
In the last two pages, there is the arrival of a guest at the airport, an indicator that change is afoot.
It has taken me a few days to sit with this novella and reflect on what it might have been about, to be able to write anything about it.
For me the characters were under developed, not much of note or intrigue happened, and though there was this theme of stagnation and the dying out of a breed versus the presence of youth that wants to break through all of that, there were too many unnecessary words used to describe that which does occur, that made for a frustrating reading experience.
The Rebel Protagonist
It reminded me a little of a similar feeling I had reading another Anglo-Irish novel set in a big house, Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, it seems I don’t particularly enjoy reading novels about misanthropes sitting around in big manor houses.
I admit that classics I do enjoy, tend to feature more rebellious protagonists, like Colette’s Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married and Claudine and Annie or Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand, and Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies and the excellent Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky.
Do you have any favourite classics of a certain type?
Reading Ireland 2023
This week, its contemporary fiction for Reading Ireland and I’m planning to read Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, which was the winner of the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of The Year and was just longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023.
Today the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 of 16 novels was announced.
Childhood in the west Irish countryside, early adulthood in a boarding house in Dublin, marriage in London; the three books follow the lives of two girls Caithleen (Kate) and Bridget (Baba), who were neighbours, school friends and boarding house room mates. Though they were not girls who had much in common personality wise, they had a shared history; without that connection, their lives might have been much worse.
Caithleen meets Eugene, something about him (half foreign, older man) reminds her of Mr Gentleman, whom she hasn’t seen for two years. The girls now live in Joanna and Gustav’s boarding house and become like family in this house, sometimes confiding in Joanna, who struggles to maintain rules and boundaries with the girls.
Again time passes, so that when we encounter the girls next, they are on the cusp of marriage. Caith (now Kate) will marry the one who abandoned her and Baba, a man who can provide for her in the manner she craves. One desires love, the other security. Sadly, there’s not much in the way of bliss.
Edna O’Brien was born in December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare. She has written over 20 works of fiction.
Birnam Wood itself is the name of a gardening collective, a group of people doing gently rebellious activism, planting sustainable gardens in places where they don’t have permission. There is a rivalrous friendship between the founder Mira and her flatmate, sidekick Shelley, who we learn early on has a desire to undermine her friend.
The farm, nestled up against a national park, was inherited by Jill Darvish; her husband Owen, a self-made pest-control business man has just been knighted for services to conservation, though he is unsure exactly why.
Valeria Cossati is a 42 year old Italian working wife, married with two children; one Sunday she is drawn to want to purchase a notebook in a local grocery store, a shop that is only permitted to be open on a Sunday, to sell tobacco. This purchase is her first act of transgression, the shopkeeper will allow it, but insists she hide the notebook in her coat.
Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter. The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, who helped lead Cuba’s fight for independence, she was the daughter of a Cuban diplomat and his Italian wife, raised in Rome, Italy. She kept alive her family’s political commitment, often running afoul of Italy’s Fascist regime.
My first encounter was her nonfiction title Handiwork, one I highly recommend as a starting place to her work and style. This title is like a spring board into her fiction, an introduction to the visual artist, the poet, the keen observer and storyteller.
Baume describes everything about them, about the house, its character, its creaks and groans, its smallest inhabitants, the habits of all those who dwell within its walls, inside its walls, outside its walls in her multiple adjective, poetic prose, that skips across the page to a rhythmic beat.
First we meet the spider that lives behind the wing mirror of their van, who takes refuge behind the glass.
Sara Baume’s debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and has been widely translated. Her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and her 2020 bestselling non-fiction book, handiwork, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Seven Steeples, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and has just been longlisted for the 
This latest novel begins with a short chapter on the last day of a young man’s life. His name is Zakaria and he lives in one of the Palestinian camps in Beirut. His death is part of a cycle of revenge, one that causes people in many countries to seek asylum elsewhere, people caught in the wrong pace at the wrong time, lives changed in a moment.
Though I have never visited Damascus, I have been to Beirut a couple of times and I found that the novel evoked many memories of being in that city (over 20 years ago) and the surrounding countryside, the presence of the Syrian army, checkpoints, traffic lights that were recently installed but not compulsory, a generation of youth that had spent their childhoods in bunkers who just wanted to listen to music and party all night long.
Daphne du Maurier was a fifth-generation descendant of a master glassblower who moved to England during the French Revolution. Until the author began researching her French ancestry, the family believed they were descended from the French aristocracy and that their ancestor Robert Busson (1747 – 1811) had fled France and the threat of the guillotine during the French Revolution.
“She was not at all snobbish,” says American academic Anne Hall, who lives in the Perche region and has made a study of the du Mauriers’ French connection. “So she was genuinely very proud when she found out her ancestors were craftsmen.”
Valérie Perrin is a photographer and screenwriter who was born in the Vosges in 1967, grew up in Bourgogne and settled in Paris in 1986, then Normandy in 1995.
After seeing this title on a few end of year Top Fiction Reads for 2022, this was one of the first books I chose, to get back into the reading rhythm. Perhaps for that reason, it took a little while to get into, but once it reached the first significant turning point, the plot became more interesting and surprising and the choices the author made, much more thought provoking. It would make an excellent book club choice.
In the initial chapters, it was difficult to believe. Every reader will bring to their reading of the story, their own imagining of how this mother could abandon all for something that feels like it will be fleeting.
Tessa Hadley is a British author of 8 novels, short stories and nonfiction. Born in Bristol in 1956, she was 46 when she published her first novel, Accidents in the Home, which she wrote while bringing up her 3 sons and studying for a PhD.
Word by Word 