“Actually, you’ve told me more than you realise. I mean to say,
now I do know all this, how can I help putting two-and-two
together? To me, the link between two things stands out a mile.”
“I’ve no idea what you mean,” she said, crushingly – with a look
which defied him to say anything more.
But he went on. “One, that stove blowing up, putting your
painter friend ‘out’ for the rest of his life; with, on top of that, a
crook making off with his money. Two, your decision to sell this
cottage – as quick as can be, provided you get your price. Would it,
by any chance, be, that the price you ask is just about the amount
of the missing money? . . . I’m not
asking
, mind you – but how can I
not wonder.”
Turning her face away from him still further, and still more
obstinately, she said nothing.
“Yes,” he said angrily, “I thought so. I can’t say how much I admire
you – that’s beside the point – but
I
still think you’re doing a terribly
wrong thing. Wrong to yourself – what business have you to
sacrifice this whole world that you’ve made – ” he looked round him
– “this
reality
for you, this whole core of your life? And, just as much
wrong to him – as a man. If
I
were he, I’d never forgive you!”
“Can’t you understand,” she impatiently cried, “that he’ll never
know
? If one or two people are careful – and I assure you, they
will
be – however can he?”
He said, with deliberate brutality: “I suppose, it
is
fairly easy to
trick a blind man.”
“Trick” stung, like a whiplash. “That’s enough, thank you,” she
said, quivering.
He was not to be silenced. “I could never – no, I would
not
– do
to a person a thing they would not forgive if they
did
know. They
may know or not, but one’s injured them, all the same. One has no
right to!”
16
Salon des Dames
Notes
“Salon des Dames,” Bowen’s first published work, appeared in the
Weekly
Westminster Gazette
on 7 April 1923 (pages 6–7) under the name “E. D.
Bowen.” “Dorothea” was her middle name. Set in Switzerland, the story
manifests Bowen’s fascination for hotels and the continent. The macabre
idea that corpses might rot unnoticed in closed rooms, as well as the
reference to apprehensive heads bobbing up suddenly, anticipates the
winding of the muffler around Monsieur Grigoroff’s neck. Although
innocent enough in context, the gesture bears implications of strangulation.
The American flirt, Miss Villars, owes touches of personality to Henry
James’s Daisy Miller. Paragraphing has been adjusted for dialogue, which
occasionally runs together without breaks. All French expressions, silently
corrected whenever faulty, have been italicised, whereas the published text
mixes both roman and italic type for French words. When Miss Villars
translates her own statements, or where they seem patently self-evident, no
translation is given.
1. “She was a wonderful girl.”
Moses
2. The original reads “Mrs. Pym,” which is clearly an error. The “was,” to
create a parallel with the other verbs, is missing after her name as well.
3. A paragraph break has been added.
4. “Once, when I was staying in Rome.”
5. “Have you read.”
6. “And once I have returned from Florence.”
7. “And then I am going to go on to Naples.”
“Moses” was published in the
Weekly Westminster Gazette
on 30 June 1923
(page 16). As with “Salon des Dames,” Bowen published the story under the
name “E. D. Bowen.” The story evokes Henry James, noticeably Roman
scenes in “Daisy Miller” and
The Portrait of a Lady
. Bowen expresses her
passion for Rome most fully in
A Time in Rome
(1960), a travelogue mixed
with a history of the city, in which she mentions the Moses statue (173). In
“Moses,” Fenella is not married to Mr. Thomson, for the narrator conjectures
how they would behave were they married.
1. Michelangelo’s statue of Moses (1515), originally intended as part of
a magnificent tomb for Pope Julius II, is located in the church of San Pietro
in Vincoli in Rome.
2. A paragraph break has been added.
“Just Imagine . . . ”
“Just Imagine . . .” appeared in the fashionable illustrated magazine,
Eve
, in
the October-December 1926 issue (pages 27, 37–9, 72, 74, 78, 80). Over
the years,
Eve
published stories by D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and
other luminaries. Whereas Noel appears never to leave England, and hardly
budges from London, Nancy comes and goes from the Argentine. The story,
for its adherence to the uncanny, owes a debt to Edgar Allan Poe’s
supernatural tales.
1. There is a zoo in Regent’s Park, which Bowen mentions in
The Pink Biscuit
The Death of
the Heart
and her essay “Regent’s Park and St. John’s Wood.”
2. Hyde Park is adjacent to Knightsbridge.
3. A paragraph break has been added.
“The Pink Biscuit” was published in the 22 November 1928 issue of
Eve
(pages 34–5, 76, 78, 80). Although it focuses on Sibella’s crisis of conscience
about stealing a biscuit, the story recalls other women’s narratives about
shopping written in the 1920s: Miss Kilman and Elizabeth Dalloway go to
the Army and Navy stores in Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway
, and Miriam
wanders London streets and window-shops in Dorothy Richardson’s
Pilgrimage
.The seaside location anticipates the interlude at Waikiki in
The
Death of the Heart
, as well as Bowen’s many other essays and stories with
littoral settings. Capitalisation in this story is sometimes erratic; I have
lower-cased “colonel,” for instance, as well as “titan.” The woman who
comes in to help, the “temporary,” sometimes appears with quotation marks
and sometimes without, so, for consistency, I have removed them all after
Mrs. Willyard-Lester’s initial reference to her.
Flavia
1. The original reads “glowed on,” which does not suit the context.
2. A paragraph break has been added.
3. The verb is mistakenly in the present tense in the original: “become.”
4. The names and pronouns cause some confusion. Sibella is alone in the
scene, except for the couples who turn to look at her. The “she” has no clear
referent, and, in context, it makes no sense that Sibella is unconscious of her
own appearance.
5. In the published text, the word is misspelt, “ascetism.”
Bowen wrote “Flavia” for
The Fothergill Omnibus
, edited by John Fothergill and
published in November 1931 by Eyre & Spottiswoode in London (pages
57–70). Fothergill concocted a basic plot around which seventeen different
authors crafted a story:
A man gets into correspondence with a woman whom he doesn’t know
and he finds romance in it. Then he sees a girl, falls in love with her in
the ordinary way, marries her and drops the academic correspondence.
Happiness, then friction. He writes again to the unknown woman and
finds consolation till by an accident it is discovered that the married
couple are writing to one another. (v)
Other contributors included G. K. Chesterton, A. E. Coppard, L. P. Hartley,
Storm Jameson, Margaret Kennedy, and Rebecca West.
1. The original reads “were,” a grammatical error, for the verb agrees with
“Caroline.”
She Gave Him
2. Wengen: a village in Switzerland known for its ski slopes.
3.
The Athenaeum
: a literary journal that ran from 1828 to 1921, at which
time it was incorporated into the
Nation
. In turn the
Nation
merged with the
New Statesman
, for which Bowen wrote reviews.
4. Kruschen salts: a proprietary aperient (medicinal, laxative). The
advertising slogan, “that Kruschen feeling,” was popular in the 1920s.
5. The original reads “all woman,” which should be plural.
6. Marcel Boulestin: a writer and chef (1878–1943). Boulestin translated
Max Beerbohm’s
The Happy Hypocrite
into French, then published his own
novel,
Les Fréquentations de Maurice
, in 1911. Having conquered the literary
world, he opened the restaurant, Boulestin’s, in Covent Garden in 1911,
which introduced London to classic French cooking. He published the
bestselling book,
The Mainstream of the Kitchen
, in 1925.
“She Gave Him” forms one chapter in
Consequences
(pages 46–51), billed,
according to its subtitle, as “a complete story in the manner of the old
parlour game in nine chapters each by a different author.” Published by the
Golden Cockerel Press and edited by the novelist A. E. Coppard,
Consequences
appeared on 14 October 1932. The entire book consists of only
sixty-seven pages. Six short chapters precede Bowen’s: “The Man” (written
by John van Druten), “The Woman” (G. B. Stern), “Where They Met”
(A. E. Coppard), “He Said to Her” (Seán O’Faoláin), “She Said to Him”
(Norah Hoult), and “He Gave Her” (Hamish Maclaren). After Bowen’s
chapter, the book winds up with “The Consequence Was” (Ronald Fraser)
and, lastly, “And the World Said” (Malachi Whitaker). Each chapter
showcases an author’s ingenuity rather than narrative continuity. The plot is
awkwardly contrived: a man named Henry Maybird goes to the country
where he meets Magdalen Taylor. Out walking, the couple see a child, also
named Henry, dodging cars on the road – as a game. Not knowing that the
child is playing, Henry Maybird saves him from an oncoming car and
sustains minor injuries by doing so. Whereas her fellow contributors write
expositorily and tend to forget material that others have introduced, Bowen
advances narrative through dialogue and circles back to previous settings
and information, such as Henry’s mother having been an accomplished
pianist. At the beginning and end of her chapter, Bowen plays on the notion
of what men and women give each other: looks and shivers. The relatively
harmless car accident in
Consequences
contrasts with the fatal car accident in
To the North
, published only four days before
Consequences
, on 10 October
1932. Sporadic ampersands appear in the Cockerel Press printing, which I
have silently changed to “and.”
1. At the end of the preceding chapter, Henry has been laid on the
ground and Magdalen, kneeling beside him, grandiloquently states that “he
must be saved at all costs” (
Consequences
45). Henry, despite his condition,
gives her a “fishy look” (45), for he suspects she has other motives in mind.
2. She became a Woman: in earlier chapters, Magdalen has a sexual
relation with a married man. She moves to Maida Vale with her beau, but
his wife ruins their domestic happiness (
Consequences
32–4).
3. Kilburn gaslight: in the first chapter of
4. The phrase, a modified translation of “Vénus toute entière à sa proie
attachée,” derives from Racine’s
Consequences
, John van Druten
writes that Henry Maybird and his musical mother live in Hampstead, very
close to Kilburn (1-2). When Henry sells the house, he claims it is located
in Kilburn “as a kind of gesture of defiance at the vanity of things material”
(7).
Phèdre
(Act I, scene iii).
Brigands
“Brigands” appeared in
The Silver Ship: New Stories, Poems, and Pictures for Children
,
edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith and published by Putnam in London in
1932 (pages 183-200). Lady Asquith identifies both boys and girls as readers
of this collection. In the introduction, she gives out her home address and
invites children to write and tell her what colour of cover they would
like to see and their preference for themes – “Fairy. Adventure. Animal.
Everyday Life” (viii) – for subsequent volumes. Other contributors to
The
Silver Ship
included Angela Thirkell, L. A. G. Strong, George Moore, Alfred
Noyes, G. K. Chesterton, Hugh de Sélincourt, and Lord David Cecil.
1. This punctuation is Bowen’s; a semi-colon after “find” would make the
sentence grammatical.
The Unromantic Princess
2. School-room and schoolroom alternate in the story; the latter spelling
has been adopted.
3. The original reads, “Priscilla stuffing with cream puddings.” The
reflexive pronoun, “herself,” has been added.
4. “Vendetta” is in upper case in the original.
5. Wheel-barrow and wheelbarrow alternate in the story; the latter
spelling has been adopted.
6. Sal volatile: an aromatic solution – ammonium carbonate – waved
under the nose to restore someone who has fainting fits.
7. The original reads “policeman,” but the previous sentence mentions
two policemen.
8. Bass: twine made from plant fibres. Because he has been tying up
hyacinths, Perkins holds the twine in his hands. Bass is also commonly used
to make brooms or mats.
Like other stories that Bowen wrote in the 1930s, “The Unromantic
Princess” was a commissioned piece. It appeared in
The Princess Elizabeth Gift
Book
, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith and Eileen Bigland (pages 83–99).
Published in 1935 by Hodder & Stoughton, the book was sold in aid of the
Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital for Children. Paul Bloomfield illustrated
“The Unromantic Princess” with two drawings. As the numerous orphans
in her novels attest, Bowen keenly observed the plight of displaced and
unhappy children. She characterises children differently in the tales that she
wrote in the 1930s. In “The Unromantic Princess,” “Brigands,” and “The
Good Earl,” children possess commonsense and bravery. Unlike adults, they
are not afflicted by grandiosity. The dismissal of the fairy godmothers in
“The Unromantic Princess” implies a rejection of an older generation, in
keeping with the privilege generally accorded to youth in the 1930s. The
plot reverses “Cinderella”: the princess looks for the boy; good sense rather
than good looks prevail. The manuscript draft of this story is in the
Columbia University archives; cleanly written, it bears few erasures and
closely resembles the published version.