Elizabeth Bowen’s stories range from the good through the excellent to the superb. The early stories often are character sketches cum anecdote. They’re good, but often end so abruptly that you wonder if there has been a problem with the text. Over time, Bowen preserved her gift of characterization and added to it a more complete sense of form. The stories she wrote through the 1930s are in some ways good examples of the short story genre reaching its conventional apex, promising and delivering tales that are provocative and yet full. The years of WWII prompted Bowen to push and […]