World of Love Elizabeth Bowen Novel Ireland Irish Setting 1st First DJ [Hardcover] Elizabeth Bowen

by Elizabeth Bowen

955 Vtg World of Love Elizabeth Bowen Novel Ireland Irish Setting 1st First DJ [Hardcover] Elizabeth Bowen [hardcover] Elizabeth Bowen [Jan 01, 1955]… B083QL47PD

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Ireland, Irish Literature, 20th Century, Historical Fiction, Novels

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange novel this is!

Jane, a young woman living with her parents, her sister, and Cousin Antonia, an eccentric older relative, in Antonia's old house in the Irish countryside, is stuck in a reality that offers little excitement until she happens to find some old love letters in the attic.

Those letters are written by Guy, a ghost from the past, fallen in the Great War. He was Jane's mother's fiancé. The letters cause disruption in the bored routines of the family. The older generation is forced to remember the long lost feeling of love, and they start to reconsider their present relationships and to rearrange themselves in the fragile world they have built upon the ruins of the lost friend, rival, and lover.

What they realise is that love is greater than the person itself. Had Guy lived, he could not have reached the pedestal they put him on after he died prematurely. Joined in antagonism, the two women who loved him form the only true lifelong relationship. And loving, they find out, is always worth more than being loved.

For Jane, the love story of the past brightens up her dull present tense, until the novel abruptly closes with the beginning of her own future love:

"They no sooner looked than they loved."

That last sentence leaves the reader wondering whether the story about to start could possibly live up to the imaginary perfect love it suggests and hints at. Just like the love for the fallen soldier wouldn't have survived, had he been alive, the story between Jane and her future lover is left untold in order not to lose power in the course of everyday banalities.

A World Of Love - An Abstraction!

A Family - A Life!

Recommended to those of you who like stories that are told with loving detail without giving you the answers, and to those of you who like to imagine the pasts and futures of characters shown in a snapshot, drawn in a quick sketch.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much to love about this short novel which depicts how a family in a ramshackle flaking farmhouse in Ireland live with a ghost.

Lilia is engaged to Guy when he dies in the war. She goes to seed. Eventually Guy’s cousin Antonia persuades her to marry Fred, a roving farmhand, and take possession of Guy’s house. Lilia and Fred produce two children. The older, Jane, one day finds some old letters in the attic and Guy’s ghost is let loose into the house. The letters were written by Guy but to whom is the mystery which explodes into the fragile equilibrium of life at Montefort.

The five main characters in this novel are all fabulous as is the dialogue they share. Lilia is a familiar Bowen character, the disappointed woman who has married beneath herself. The rivalry between her and the artistic but dehydrated Antonia is executed with thrilling insight throughout. I can’t recall many novels – Ferrante’s maybe – that dramatise so well the competitive rivalry that can exist between two women. They compete for influence over Lilia’s daughter Jane whose sexuality is awakened by finding and reading the letters. The younger daughter Maud reads aloud psalms from the Bible as curses and has an invisible familiar called Guy David who she keeps with her at all times. She provides Bowen with so much fabulous comedy. Fred, the husband, is belittled by the presence of the letters. The sixth character and maybe the best of all is the house and surrounding landscape. Bowen’s descriptive writing is at its very best here.

Occasionally Bowen is guilty of over mystification, of straining too hard to prise out meaning from her stage sets – usually when summoning Guy’s ghost who, it should be said, isn’t a physical ghost. It was only these passages and there aren’t many of them that persuaded me to meanly dock a star. On the whole though VS Pritchett gets it right – “Electric and urgent…she startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh.”

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly gothic romance: This is the coming of age story of sisters Jane and Maud, who live in Montefort Manor. They live with their parents Lilia and Fred, and Antonia who owns this gigantic gothic manor in the Irish countryside.

There’s a literal ghost that haunts Montefort: that of Lilia’s first love Guy. Precocious Jane finds a stack of letters that seem at the first glance written from Guy to her mother, but soon finds that the identity of whom the letters were written to are a puzzling mystery of intrigue and possible deception.

Lilia and Antonia’s fraught relationship is ignited by the memory of Guy, and Lady Latterly a flamboyant eccentric later befriends Jane and allows her to enter into her own possible world of love.

A haunting and tragicomic novel of manners, coming of age, jealousy and yearning- it’s no wonder Carson McCullers basically stalked Elizabeth Bowen- they write about similar themes of loneliness and isolation and of how the othered often disrupts a delicate and balanced way of living.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen is something of a forgotten author now, which is a shame as she writes so beautifully and is wonderful at capturing the relationships between people. This novel is set in Montefort; a corroding country house in County Cork. The house was owned by Guy, who died in WWI, leaving his cousin, Antonia, as heir. Troubled that Guy had died without leaving a will, and without marrying his fiancée, Lilia, Antonia finds herself interfering in others lives. She engineers a marriage between a distant relation, Fred Danby, and Lilia; allowing her a position of patronage, in which they essentially keep the house and she keeps the best room and flits in and out of their lives.

Fred and Lilia have two daughters – the beautiful, golden haired Jane, and the younger, rather resented and ignored Maud. Jane is certainly Antonia’s favourite, as well as Fred’s, and Antonia tends to use Jane as a way of asserting power over Lilia. Indeed, for me, the central relationship of the novel is that between Lilia and Antonia, which Bowen writes wonderfully. It is a relationship of mutual dependence, of rivalry, jealousy and resentment on both sides.

Another main character in this novel is Guy, long , but ever present. The house is, indeed, timeless. Despite the profusion of clocks (and Maud’s obsession with listening to the chimes of Big Ben), nobody really knows what the time is. Things have simply been left in the house – as though Guy went off to war and shrugged the house off, for others to move into. One day, in the heat of summer, Jane discovers a packet of love letters from Guy, which triggers all sorts of memories and passions from those in the house. Everyone within the house are full of uncertainty – of their status, their relationships, their past – and the letters create a disturbance among those that live there.

When Lady Latterly, who lives nearby, sends for Jane, this again marks her out as different and chosen. In this novel, we virtually see Jan move from girlhood to womanhood, as she realises what she has done and the repercussions it causes. Her actions change not only the relationships between the members of her family, but her own with them. Bowen deserves to be re-discovered, as she is a brilliant writer, with a real depth of feeling. She wrote this novel after the death of her husband and, although she had many affairs, some long-term, she is obviously missing her partner in this book, which is full of loss and the shadow of the dead that inhabit the spaces of the living.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

He had not finished with them, nor they with themselves, nor they with each other: not memories was it but expectations which haunted Montefort.

Written in exquisite prose, this is a novel which requires close reading - like Bowen's The Heat Of The Day, much of the substance of the book resides in the not-said; the significance, for example, of a long-estranged married couple sitting under a chestnut tree 'almost apart'.

Taking place in the liminal space between the past and the future, the story is an intimate one, emotionally claustrophobic, and heightened by the unexpected heat of an Irish summer. Bowen, with delicate perceptiveness, unpicks the tense, fragile and yet freighted bonds in a family: a marriage built on misunderstandings, a cousin tied to her relations through resentments and a kind of need, a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

There's a sort of brittleness about Bowen's writing, something ethereal even when she's writing of jealousy and desire. A gorgeous evocation of mood and emotions.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a few of Elizabeth Bowen's books to date, but still have rather a lot of her oeuvre outstanding.  With this in mind, I could not resist picking up a copy of her novella, A World of Love, which was first published in 1955.  This is one of Bowen's later works, and only two finished novels were written after it.

The premise of A World of Love is that a twenty-year-old woman named Jane Danby, living in a crumbling old house in County Cork, Ireland, finds a package of old letters in the attic.  This leads her 'into the world of love', in which a rather eccentric neighbour, Lady Vesta Latterly, 'rich, promiscuous, parvenue Englishwoman... will play a part in Jane's awakening.'  The house, Montefort, 'harbours a group of people held together by odd ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner who was killed in France as a young man.'  Jane lives there with her parents, Fred and Lilia, and twelve-year-old sister Maud, 'all of whom owe their domestic situation to Montefort's owner, Antonia', who inherited the house from her cousin Guy, who died during the First World War.  The Danby family's place here is 'uncertain, never secure, never defined.'

A World of Love takes place during a heatwave.  It begins on a sultry June morning.  Here, writes Bowen, 'The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.  There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river.  The river gorge cut deep through the uplands.  This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world - painted, expectant, empty, intense.'  As I have come to expect with Bowen's writing, her descriptions sing.  The way in which she writes about Jane, too, is unusual and exquisitely layered.  When she introduces her protagonist, she asserts: 'Kindled by summer though cool in nature, she was a beauty.  The cut of her easy golden hair was anachronistic over the dress she wore: this, her height and something half naive half studied about her management of the sleeves and skirts made her like a boy actor in woman's clothes, while what was classical in her grace made her appear to belong to some other time.'

Bowen goes on to explore the isolation which surrounds the house and its inhabitants.  The day before, she explains, 'They had all been to the Fete, and a backwash from it still agitated their tempers and nerves - in the house itself residual pleasure-seeking ghosts had been set astir.  The Hunt Fete, which drew the entire country, now was the sole festivity of the lonely year, for Montefort the only annual outing - which, more and more each summer, required nerve.'

The Vintage edition of A World of Love is introduced by Selina Hastings.  She notes that this book was written soon after the death of Bowen's husband, but does not perhaps encompass the depths of sadness which one might expect.  Instead, writes Hastings, 'although the book is in a sense a ghost story, with the pervasive presence of the dead permeating both place and plot, yet its mood is lyrical and light, a spirited comedy of manners finely balanced over a more sombre subterranean level of betrayal, frustration and loss.'  Bowen herself, indeed, called this novella 'a joy to write'.  Hastings praises Bowen's protagonist; she notes that she 'has an almost wilful independence of spirit very different from the other solitary young girls who people Bowen's novels.'  

The family dynamics at play throughout this novella are deep and somewhat complicated.  The letters which Jane discovers quite by chance, wrapped up in a muslin dress which she takes a fancy to in the attic, provide a crux in the novella, causing - or perhaps just providing a means for allowing - the characters to quarrel amongst themselves.  These letters are not overly interesting to Jane at first: 'The ink, sharp in the candlelight, had not faded.  She could not fail, however, when first she handled them, to connect these letters with that long-settled dust: her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belonged to history.'  They soon begin to grow with an almost mythic importance in Jane's mind, however.

A World of Love is an opulent novella, written by the most observant of authors.  Much of the little action which plays out here revolves around the characters, and what they mean to one another.  There is often a great deal of tension embedded within their relationships.  Each of Bowen's creations is unusual in some way; Maud, for instance, has an imaginary friend of sorts named Gay David, who is banned from entering the dining room, and Lilia has 'a neurosis about anyone standing outside a door.'  Whilst not overly plot heavy, there is a lot to consider within A World of Love, and it is a novella which I am sure to be thinking about for a long time to come.

[Chavelli Sulikowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cannot wait to sink my teeth into Bowen’s Collected Works, a veritable tome sitting next to my bed along with a conglomeration of free bookmarks, an eye mask and an empty tube of Crabtree and Evelyn Gardner’s Hand Cream.
Apparently this is her landmark piece. Short and subtle but not lacking in substance, it centres on the lives of an unusual group of familial relations in the Montefort mansion in country Ireland. Her prose is picture perfect, encapsulating the tight atmosphere and unravelling relationships between the odd bunch of characters. I thought this was a sublime opening: “The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. The light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world – painted, expectant, empty, intense. The month was June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late wakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast. At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland’s amazement at being cloudless.”
There is an intrinsic emotional tension that permeates the novel, the characters are despite their closeness, never really at ease with one another and remain mysteriously ‘strange’ even all living under the one roof. Antonia, Lila and Fred and thee dynamics between them are a classic example. Lila’s two very different daughters also fail to fit in, they are quirky, independent and deeply secretive – there is no apparent sisterly bond and everyone seems basically to operate in their own world.
This is not your typical Edwardian family saga. It is set in the country, but it is not bucolic neither is it romantic. Nostalgia – forget it. Bowen defies all our assumptions. The cover is deeply deceiving. Thoroughly enjoyed it, such a surprising read.

[Mighty Aphrodite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il tempo è passato sulla tenuta di Montefort, rendendo ogni cosa più antica, più vecchia, più dolorosamente decadente. C’era stato un tempo, un tempo ormai lontano, in cui quella casa ha sperimentato il calore di una famiglia, l’allegria e i dispetti dei bambini, i loro amori precoci e incomprensibili. Poi, però, le voci si sono spenti, le orme si sono cancellate e la casa è rimasta da sola, senza più nessuno a prendersene cura.

Anche se ora la casa è abitata, quell’aura di abbandono, di assenza è rimasta inalterata e si avverte, con un brivido, nell’atmosfera cristallina e solitaria delle stanze, nell’incedere selvaggio della natura che prende il sopravvento delle porte con i suoi rampicanti inarrestabili. Nulla sembra destinato a resistere a Montefort, tutto sembra desideroso di essere inghiottito dalle sabbie del tempo, dalla forza insopprimibile del passato.

In una piccola avventura in soffitta, Jane scopre alcune lettere d’amore scritte da Guy, giovane morto durante la prima guerra mondiale, primo e unico amore di sua madre. Curiosa del loro contenuto, quasi preda di un incantesimo, Jane porta con sè le lettere e non può fare a meno di leggere, di immaginare Guy, di fantasticare su cosa voglia dire essere oggetto di quell’amore. Le sembra quasi di poterne evocare il volto, il corpo, solo pronunciandone il nome, quasi si fosse creato improvvisamente un legame tra lei e Guy, tra lei e l’aldilà, quasi una porta si fosse spalancata davanti ai suoi occhi avidi su quello che sembrava essere stato dimenticato e che, invece, continuava a covare sotto le ceneri, silenzioso e letale.

continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bowen's eighth novel started with great promise, terrifically written physical description:

The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. The light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world - painted, expectant, empty, intense. The month was June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late wakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast. At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland's amazement at being cloudless.

Unfortunately the novel couldn't keep up that standard, with its hazy characters and shapeless premise. Jane, a 20-year-old living at a decaying Irish manor house owned by her parents' friend Antonia, finds a packet of love letters in the attic from Guy, who formerly owned the house and willed it to Antonia before being killed in the Great War. Guy had been Jane's mother, Lilia's, fiance. After Guy's death Antonia fixed up Lilia with Fred, who got married and had Jane and her sister Maud. So ostensibly the novel is going to be all about the letters. Except that it's not. We never read the letters - not a word from them. Only at the end of the novel do we find out who the letters are addressed to, and it's a mild surprise, but not a big one.

There's nothing wrong with teasing us with the letters and then having the novel be about the relationships between the characters both living and dead. The problem is that Bowen is usually trying too hard and the writing gets weird. Example: "The chauffeur, overhearing or not, reclasped Martian gauntlets behind his back: he was staring in the other direction faceless. That uniform of his was disaster-dark among the feckless front garden roses."

And: "With a cry, Lady Latterly downed tools."

She what? Was Bowen sober?

I did learn a new word, or maybe just one Bowen made up: wadge. "By the time she looked to see what was happening, the wadge of letters was in his hands..."

She also introduces a brand new character in the last couple pages, which is just wrong.

[Annelies · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvellous book. You can't just say it's because of this or that. Bowen builds a microclimate inhabited by just a few people. The tension between these people is one of the major themes in the book. The characterisation is phenomenal. The book begins with a staple of letters by a former lover of the mother that is found. Then a satirical drama unfolds itself. It's never boring, it's an interesting world circling around these letters. It's also a book in which love underlines subtly the whole story. One word: subtle.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

What impressed me most in this haunting love story was how Bowen made it so atmospheric. At times the mood is light and elusive, at others it is heavy and oppressive as the heat of the Irish summer overwhelms the characters. The descriptions of the ruined country home Montefort are carefully chosen to reflect the way the characters live in the past. The sentence construction is occasionally odd and jarring, but overall the writing is very powerful.

Montefort was the home of Guy, who died in WWI. As he had no will, the property passed to cousin Antonia rather than Lilia, his fiancée. Antonia takes over Lilia’s life, arranging her marriage to Fred. It is their daughter Jane who has found some of Guy’s letters in the attic, and their appearance brings long-held rivalries and resentments into a new light.

The relationship of Antonia and Lilia is an interesting one and Guy’s presence as a kind of ghost in their lives develops this. There is a lot below the surface that deals with grief, lost love, and disappointment but there is also a note of hope and renewal. A sensitive and evocative book.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This strange novel was hard to put down even though nothing much happens and I didn’t feel particularly close to any of the characters except maybe young Maud. Set in an old Irish manor house, the characters seem to all be between things, waiting for something to happen, perhaps appropriately set between the wars. It’s intense, and the descriptive writing drew me in.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A WORLD OF LOVE by Elizabeth Bowen

In its own way as potent a haunting as A Turn Of The Screw. After half the 20th century has passed, leaving more than one decimated generation, the big houses of Protestant Irish aristocracy ruinous or passed on to new hands, a tangled family knot, a kind of clan keloid in the wake of an epochal bereavement in 1918, sees the tomb of an ancient or at least old muslin dress disturbed, the ghost of Guy set free - or granted a season among the adults, for is he not the younger daughter, Maud's not-quite-imaginary friend, Gay David? - with a packet of letters to someone; not the rightful fiancee, not the girl cousin and once-soulmate, maybe not the shadowy third 'only a face'? The long-ago youth fills beautiful, cold Jane with warm romance, threatens gnomic Maud's need for patriarchy, taunts Antonia with her fossil-like embeding in the ruins, plays the old jealousy games with Lilia, brings all to a crisis, visits an old haunt where Jane is neither corrupted nor seduced, and then, bestowing a ribbon on Kathie, returns with and to ashes as Jane speeds away, Gay David still attending on Maud, to finally admit the intimation of a future into this stopped barometer of a family.

[Val · Rating 3 out of 5]

A loosely related Anglo-Irish family living in a large country house experience a range of emotions.
That sounds very similar to a previous book of Bowen's I read; both have the same intensity of feeling and very little actually happens in either, but they are not all that similar in feel. While the family in "The Last September" were becalmed awaiting the winds of change, this family are shipwrecked by something that happened many years earlier. Neither family understand each other all that well, but there is not as much affection or goodwill towards each other here.
I think i will try one of her books set in London next.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

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, but they were worlds apart in their use of it.

Yes, 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 verbage that obfuscates the narrative and left me wondering what exactly this was about. A World of Love? Absolutely not.

A young man who would have owned a grand Anglo-Irish house, inconveniently dies in the war, leaving a fiance Lilia, who sadly has no status having not 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.

One summer teenage Jane pokes around the attic and discovers a bundle of letters folded into an old dress. There are lots of conversations around the letters, but never about them - which is a little like the tone of the novel, everyone talks and yet avoids all the issues.

There is little character development, not much of note or intrigue happens, and too many unnecessary words are used to try and describe that which does occur.

I guess this will be the last Bowen I will read.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 3 out of 5]

A World of Love is the first of Elizabeth Bowen's work that I have read and I found her to be quite the wordsmith, with sophisticated punctuation and unusual sentence structure; ie: "Heavy was the scent, rank the inside darkness which filtered through." And heavy is the psychological drama of this short novella which delves into the complicated emotional relationship between several people living together in a crumbling manor house in Ireland.
The backstory is that Antonia has inherited Montefort from her cousin, Guy, who was killed in WWI. For some reason, she took on the responsibility for his fiance, Lilia, for whom he had made no financial arrangements before going off to war. Antonia takes Lilia under her wing in such a way that keeps the woman from moving on with her life. A match is struck with Fred, a byblow cousin, and he and Lilia wed and move in with Antonia where he farms the land and splits the profits with her. In exchange, she provides room and board for the couple and the two daughters, Jane and Maud, whom they eventually give birth to.
Jane, the oldest daughter, is twenty years old now on the oppressively hot June day on which this story begins. She has been exploring trunks in the attic where she discovered a packet of love letters written by Guy to some unrevealed women. This has the effect of raising his ghost for all of them and shaking up their unexamined lives: Lilia's lost love that has never been tempered by reality, the perfect spectre of a man whom Fred has never quite been able to compete with, a reminder of a youthful love between cousins that might have been something more. Now even Jane begins to fall under Guy's spell as he reveals himself to her in his love letters. Her baby sister Maud is not above tormenting them all with these letters when they fall into her possession, even resorting to a little extortion. What a family! As Lilia bemoans, "I'm beginning to think I'm ill with all the monomania in this house."
The reader gets the sense of lives that have been allowed to drift on day to day without any real purpose or connection. Lilia now comes up smack against her latent emotions: "Sorrow was there in front of her like an apparition: she saw now, with belated dread, what life had proved to be, what it had made of her. Could there have been an otherwise, an alternative? Who was to tell her, who was to know? She did not pity herself, for there is an austere point at which even self-pity halts, forbidden. Loss had been utter: not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him. What had now happened must either kill her or, still worse, force her to live..."
Interesting read but not one that will stick with me; hence the three-star rating. I didn't like any of the characters, to tell you the truth. I will look forward to reading more of Bowen's novels however, as she is a fine writer.

[Chrissie]

**************************
*The Death of the Heart 4 star
*The Last September 4 stars
*The House in Paris 3 stars
*The Demon Lover 2 stars
*The Heat of the Day TBR
*A World of Love TBR
*The Little Girls TBR

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written and a has very simple plot. It is more of characterization of a family living in a dilapidated estate in Ireland than a story. Descriptions of the land and its people are wonderfully done. Unfortunately, it was sometimes difficult to read through due to too many double negatives. Enjoyable but doesn't stand out.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes you just can’t beat a finely wrought modernist sentence

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes I love Bowen, sometimes she bores me to tears. And this is pretty easy to explain: when she's writing about peoples' relationships and the way we're always talking past one another and not saying what needs to be said, she's fabulous. When she's describing landscape or interior decorating she's almost always insufferable. Unfortunately for this short book, there's too much landscape and not enough people not quite relating to each other. Also, the ending is unbearably stupid; I suggest you just don't read the last chapter, which seems to have been added with the hope that someone would turn the book into a Hollywood rom-com. Also, what is with all the Yoda speak? "Cold, the room was now in the afternoon"? (Okay, I made that up, but you get the point.) Is that how Irish Protestants speak? Really?

Anyway, read Bowen, but read The Last September or The Heat of the Day instead.

[Asta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange sentence structure it has, this novel. A long time reading it I in the end took.

[Rahul Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been meaning to read Bowen for years now. I am so glad I was able to fulfil it this year. In this little book, we meet a family living in an old house in a county of Ireland. There's 20-year old Jane, who's recently discovered a muslin dress, and a bundle of letters from the house's attic. Her younger sister Maud, who plays wildly disruptive games, and curses the people in the house. Their mother Lilia, a rather sad woman who's trying to hold the family together. Her husband Fred, who cannot find anything interesting than his work in the fields. Lastly, there's Antonia, the woman on to whom the house was bestowed, and who's asked her cousin Lilia and her family to manage it. The discovery of the letters has pushed the family into a whirlwind. Memories from erstwhile days are invoked. Lilia finds herself in constant tussle with Fred, or Antonia. She is anxious of confronting the letters when asked by her daughters. Antonia and Fred are at loggerheads about the present so envisaged by Antonia all those years ago. Jane, however, is attending parties and falling in love. Bowen's story was high in scope, and brilliant in text. Every word seemed to have weighed in her mind before it got into this seamless writing. Her descriptions of the house, the county and the characters' past were swoon-worthy. I was having to pause in between, read it again to feel the charm of her words. Similarly, the scope of such a short novel was admirable. From war, loss, love, death, sacrifice, to anger, violence, superstition, horror. Bowen has spun a magical thread that had me enraptured and glued to the text. It kept me at the edge of my seat to know what's coming next. At the same time, it made me sit back and luxuriate in the images she conjures throughout the story. I do not think it's the best novel by any chance because I did expect more from the story but I am certainly going to buy all her books now and consume them in years to come. I mean, it's an Irish writer, after all. How could I not love her!?

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen takes place in the Irish countryside at Montefort manor. Guy, the previous owner of the estate, dies during World War I, and the estate goes to his first cousin Antonia. Antonia feels sorry for Guy’s fiancée Lilia and finds a solution to take care of her. Antonia makes an offer to Fred, an illegitimate cousin of Guy’s, to farm the estate and to marry Lilia. Fred accepts and he and Lilia end up having two daughters. Jane is now age 20 and her younger sister Maud is a teenager. While poking around in the attic, Jane discovers some love letters written by Guy to an unknown person. This causes more drama in the family.

The book initially sounded interesting enough but quickly disappointed me with its lack of action and dreary moodiness. I could rant and rave about the beautiful prose and sumptuous descriptions, but I don’t think I will. I had a hard time with this book. I kept backing up and asking myself who is speaking and what is the point of this conversation?

I got a bit overwhelmed at Lady Latterly’s dinner party in chapter 5 where we suddenly hear about Tommy, Mamie, Tipps, Fitz, Terence, Peregrene and Vesta for the first time only to have them quickly fade into the background. Who are all of these people and what is their role in the story? What exactly is going on with those mysterious letters from Guy?

Things get a bit odd in the story as supposedly Guy is lurking around as a ghost on the estate. The younger sister Maud is also having regular conversations with her imaginary friend Gay David. The big finale of the story involves riding in a van to Shannon Airport to meet Richard Priam (I’m still not quite sure who he is) that Jane apparently falls in love with at first sight. End of story. OK, whatever.

I’m guessing that this book will appeal to hard core Elizabeth Bowen fans. I am reading Eva Trout next which I understand actually has somewhat of a plot. I hope that I like it better than A World of Love.

This book is on Boxall’s “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list.

[audrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know whether this is going to be another Last September situation where I have to read the book four times to get it, but on this, my second read of it, all I can think is that this is exactly the kind of book Cold Comfort Farm takes the piss out of.

[Carly · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first book this year that I couldn't finish. The prose is so convoluted, I had no idea what was happening 90% of the time. Forgettable characters and non-existent plot too. I'm afraid I won't be reading any more Elizabeth Bowen.

[Stef Smulders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. The amount of description makes it too exausting for a non-English reader though. I need a translated version.

[Orlaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Ric Cheyney · Rating 4 out of 5]

MAKE DO AND MEND FAMILY
My second Bowen book, and another very enjoyable, funny, clever piece of work. It is not as ravishing as The Little Girls, but that's a high standard for anyone to be set. There are more shadows in this one, especially in the area of relationships, fidelity, family and the still-felt losses of war. The family in their big Irish house are a full set of vivid characters, and the book keeps the focus very general rather than following a single protagonist.
For me, the most appealing aspect was the portrayal of the kind of forgiveness that can be found most easily (usually) in a family. Lilia knows more than she reveals, Antonia works quietly behind the scenes in an attempt to preserve important feelings and memories, and Jane is a bright example of the pioneering that all young people have to do for themselves as they emerge into full adulthood. These and the other members of the menagerie still annoy each other and deliver plenty of resentful complaints along the way, but they show enough tolerance, understanding and, (that word at last) LOVE to make things work out reasonably well in a fairly acceptable way most of the time.
As with one family, so with the human race, one would like to hope. There is some optimism at the end of the book, but it still feels more relevant to the Danby family than to the family of man.
One aspect that I felt did not work well: there are at least a couple of episodes where Bowen tries to portray a mystical/ghostly/supernatural atmosphere or event, and these inevitably require diminished levels of precise expression/description; but precision and striking originality of expression are exactly the areas where Bowen most excels, so the result is less than satisfying.
Second-rate Bowen is still better than most other writers, it seems to me so far, and she writes so beautifully that it is really a pleasure to read almost anything she has to say. Even when nothing much is happening and nothing terribly clear is being said, I invariably enjoy the company of Bowen's characters and her elegant, original writing style.

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love conquers all, even the effects of the First World War's slaughter of young men. To me that seems to be essence of A World of Love. The old grief, bitterness and jealousies of relationships and love affairs will be swept away by the new generation's young love.

Lilia and Antonia, it is heavily hinted, were in love with Guy, the owner of Montefort, one of the old country estates of Protestant Ireland. Guy, Antonia's cousin, was killed in the War and without leaving a will which may have favoured Lilia as his fiancée. Antonia therefore inherited the estate and the family money as the next of kin. Feeling that Lilia has been treated unfairly Antonia allows her to live in Montefort but insists she marries Fred, who farms the estate as a tenant. Meanwhile Antonia enjoys the high life in London. Lilia and Fred have two children: Jane, who is twenty when the story begins, attractive and filled with a desire to enjoy life, and Maud, twelve years old and dumpy, spotty and full of a rebellious attitude towards anyone who disapproves of her – the most appealing character of them all.

They are the principal protagonists, all coping – sometimes at each other's throats, sometimes sulking, but nearly always good humour and tolerance prevails. However, dominating life at Montefort is the shadow, the spirit of poor dead Guy. He, or his memory, is controlling them all in one way or another – until Jane can no longer be held back. I feel she represents the next generation for whom the War has become the war, something in their parents' experience not theirs.

Jane finds some old love letters from Guy in the house and reads them. Only she knows their secret. Then she is invited to a party by Lady Latterly, a local English landowner. These two events cause the unravelling of the old ways at Montefort and the pushing of Guy into history. Jane burns the letters before either Lilia or Antonia can see them and refuses to disclose to whom they had been sent. Lady Latterly has been taken by Jane's personality and persuades her into a meeting with her friend's young son. The meeting takes place at Shannon Airport, just to emphasise that Jane is bringing in a new order to the world of love. Let Lilia and Antonia dream about Guy in their decaying old house which has come to symbolise a past world. Jane and her new lover – and little Maud – are living now with airports, airplanes, cars, foreign travel, and a life to look forward to. A world of love has died. Vivat amour.

[Marija · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen has somehow managed to portray stasis as an art form. In a book where mere suggestion alone can result in so much soul searching and change is truly amazing. Yet her story is told beautifully and not only that, but there are some wonderfully bleak moments thrown in as well. The ending is both unexpected and eccentric; yet it’s fun...it’s on par with that perfect 10 moment with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore. I couldn’t help but giggle. ;) That said, this scene does work, since you can almost picture the past reborn.

In regards to the characters:

Antonia: At times, her relationship with Guy reminded me of Cathy and Heathcliff, i.e. after Cathy’s marriage...that selfish teasing...playing with each other’s emotions getting joy out of witnessing each other’s pain. Guy told her, you’ll never be rid of me and in some ways, she never was. However, that’s also where the similarities end. For Antonia, freedom seems to be her one true love.

Lilia: Guy essentially takes up all of her coherent thoughts...except for her desire to be a mistress of the house. In some ways, these two things are her selfish obsession, even though she knows neither of these two things can be realized. For her, everyone and everything else cancels out, especially her two daughters.

Fred: Outwardly, he has the appearance of everything that is manly—strength, stature and a rakish past. However that’s where it all ends, since he turns into mush in Lilia’s hands and through the presence of those letters. I wholeheartedly agreed with Maud perceiving him as “looking small.”

Jane: Jane inadvertently brings everything to the surface and out in the open. She’s essentially a young innocent, whose heart has been awakened, yearning for a first love.

Maud: Oh, the bells, the bells! One of her chief pleasures in her young life is listening to chimes of Big Ben on the wireless. She’s eccentric for a child, yet she’s more of an adult than anyone else in this story. She is the only one who is really trying to put things into motion and get things done. Unfortunately on the surface it seems her efforts are unappreciated.