If, as the poet Thomas McCarthy has claimed, the Anglo-Irish are “born for remembrance”, this has surfaced not only in the formal memoir, but also in the virtual reality of the novel, the play and the short story. I wish to cast a coldish eye on two women writers who, in differing ways, hold a mirror to the society of which they were ineluctably part. From Lady Morgan, through Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross and Susanne Day to Jennifer Johnston, there is a rich, imaginative and distinctive feminine Anglo-Irish literature. Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – born some five years apart, but dying more than 20 – are close to being its last representatives.
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, who lived from 1899 to 1973, was the only child of Henry Bowen and his first wife Florence Colley. Henry, a Dublin barrister, suffered from intermittent mental illness, which resulted in Elizabeth and her mother, from 1905, living with relatives in Kent. “I only thought she was lovely because I loved her,” wrote Bowen in her autobiographical fragment, Seven Winters: “She explained to me candidly that she kept a governess because she did not want to scold me herself.” But Florence died young; and Elizabeth was raised in England by aunts. Later she mused that “Possibly, it was England made me a novelist”; and she wrote often of the plight of the orphaned, dislocated child.
Elizabeth was educated by governesses and at day schools. Downe House boarding school near Orpington, Kent, which she attended between 1914 and 1917, was a place where, as she said, “personality came out in patches, like damp in a wall”. Here, in her words, she “…learnt to define happiness as a kind of inner irrational exaltation…”. School writings show her mannered style there from the first. Bowen entered the London County Council School of Art in 1918, but she only stayed for two terms. She ended her formal education by subsequently studying journalism, which served her well in her later literary life.
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Molly Keane was, in her words, a “great chum” of Elizabeth Bowen’s. But their lives followed very different paths. Born Mary Nesta Skrine, in 1904 at Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, her mother was a poet who, as Moira O’Neill wrote Songs of the Glens of Antrim, and published two novels, The Elf Errant and An Easter Vacation. Molly’s Latin temperament clashed with her mother’s Ulster Victorianism, and her childhood was not particularly happy. Troubled mother-daughter relationships infuse her fiction, from the novels Full House and The Rising Tide in the ’30s to Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving in the ’80s. “I have no education,” she claimed. “I could never learn my grammar – it was always the same to me as arithmetic.” Supervised at home by a succession of governesses, she spent some time at the French School, Bray, Co Wicklow where, homesick and disliked by prim girls, she escaped by writing.
Bowen started her literary career in 1923, with a volume of short stories. That year she married Alan Charles Cameron, assistant secretary for education in Northampton. The courtship is as impenetrable as that of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. A decade at Oxford from 1925, following Cameron’s appointment as the city’s secretary for education, saw publication of three volumes of short stories and four novels. Of these The Last September is perhaps the most significant. It paints a picture of the Anglo-Irish gentry in 1920 in muscular, but terminal, decline. Behind the facade of set-piece dinners, tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching. These characters, with their conflicting desires and divided loyalties, are heading for unavoidable disaster; and this is clear from the outset. As a critic has said:
“What makes The Last September so vividly poignant is that it never turns a judgmental eye on either side of its many small skirmishes, whether it’s a nation fighting for independence from a ruler reluctant to cede control or a girl struggling to free herself from a paternalistic society that has served her people well for centuries. Instead, it merely presents its complicated world as a given, and lets us follow its inhabitants as they try to navigate clear paths for themselves through moral uncertainties.”
The book was brought to film in 1998, with a screenplay by John Banville.
If money was not quite as important to Bowen in her early years, it was certainly so to Keane – although it could be held that the necessity to supplement a meagre dress allowance and feed an expensive hunting habit hardly qualified her as the epitome of the starving artist. Since it was her view that a woman who wrote had no chance with men – “…I would have been banned from every respectable house in county Carlow…” – she determined upon a nom-de-plume. She finally settled on the gender-neutral MJ Farrell, apparently the name of a public house spotted – characteristically – on return from a day’s hunting. As such, she wrote 11 novels between 1926 and 1951. The first, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, a frivolous romance, was published, appropriately enough, by Mills and Boon.
Bowen was never published by Mills and Boon, yet she also is often dismissed in a faintly patronising way as intelligent, but not intellectual. Angus Wilson’s comment is typical:
“For all her years spent…amongst Oxford academics she remained always an upper-class woman of hardy, firm intelligence; she was never the slave of the brilliant academic world as Virginia Woolf, a greater genius, too often was.”
Nevertheless, she apparently moved easily in Oxford circles. New friends amongst the university’s intelligentsia in the ’20s included Isaiah Berlin, David Cecil and Cyril Connolly. And Bowen set some store by her serious work. Her prefaces, and her “Notes on writing a novel”, she said “…were not journalism, and I stand by them…, for which I would wish survival”.
Both Bowen and Keane were striking women. Keane had the classic mannerisms and features of the Anglo-Irish, together with an attractive face, brown eyes and a cut-glass accent, allied with a formal social behaviour. A bust by John Coll is in Waterford County Library. Bowen, though rather waspishly described by Virginia Woolf as “…a very honourable horse faced, upper class hard constricted mind…” attracted admirers of both sexes. “Hers was a handsome face, handsome rather than beautiful, with its bold nose, high cheekbones and tall forehead,” remarked May Sarton, one of Elizabeth’s female pursuers. Atmospheric portraits of Bowen include a painting by Patrick Hennessy in Cork’s Crawford Gallery and an Angus McBean photograph in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
An attractive stammer, sometimes bothersome, dated from her mother’s death. Charming, but occasionally snobbish, in later years she came rather to like American glitz and easy manners. However, she dropped people ruthlessly and her behaviour could be casual, unpredictable and somewhat disconcerting. When once asked by David Cecil to a family dinner, she is said to have replied: “David, I think you know by now that I want to see you either alone or at a large party.” Few got close, but those few tended to be of high quality. “Whom one sleeps with is always rather important,” ambiguously declaimed Bowen, in another context. At Oxford she had an affair with the critic Humphry House. Lovers and good friends elided, one into the other. Sean O’Faolain was such, of whom she had initially enquired of a friend: “Is he nice? He might possibly be quite dim.”
Keane had no such pretensions. Her upbringing was classic fin-de-siecle Anglo-Irish, with horses and dead animals sometimes seeming more important than children and the living. This was reflected in the early novels. Of this phase of her writing, Mad Puppetstown is perhaps the best-enduring. A happy childhood, counterpoint to Keane’s own, tragically ending in war, is wistfully captured and lyrically described in bright-cut phraseology - “…the very house looked languorous. It seemed to open the pores of its stones to the day… A slippery thread of a path spun its way across the field to an unseen gateway, where, under the trees, the air trembled, laden blue in the heat”.
Of the other novels, Devoted Ladies, published in 1934, is the most notable. It was daring for the day, appearing only six years after Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity. Its satirical subject-matter – the attempted prising apart of a pair of lesbians by a man – has both a modern feel and is somewhat quaintly dated. And certain academics have been unable to resist the temptation of claiming both Keane and Bowen as feminist and lesbian writers.
In the 1930s Bowen thrived in Oxford, New York, Italy and, increasingly, London, where she moved in 1935 when Cameron joined the BBC. Two of her finest novels – The House in Paris in 1935 and The Death of the Heart in 1938 – dated from this period. The latter is a forensic examination of upper-middle-class values with its “bitter kernel”, as she said, grounded in the end of her affair with Goronwy Rees, the Marxist intellectual. It deals with the way that society and individuals function only by deception. Bowen had coped with her father’s mental illness by what she called “a campaign of not noticing”. This was reflected in the indirectness of her prose. Physical action tended to be minimal, with plot often complex and difficult to follow.
Both had children. Molly Keane had two daughters – Virginia and Sally, and after her husband’s death, moved to England to secure a decent education for them. Bowen’s “child”, on the other hand – like most children, troublesome and expensive, but also an object of pride, love and refuge – was Bowen’s Court, near Doneraile, Co Cork, the house she had inherited from her father on his death in 1930. Elizabeth often established identity by conflating person and place, leading her to represent the latter (especially houses) as living entities. In The Last September, the rebels that destroyed the Big House were its “executioners”; in The House in Paris she wrote of “sending vibrations up the spine of the house”; and in The Death of the Heart even the furniture has life. In The Heat of the Day, Holme Dene, the house of the spy, Robert Kelway is, as Eibhear Walshe puts it “…a house made for surveillance, a man-eating house”. Her own house was similarly characterised; writing of its demolition in 1960 she was glad that Bowen’s Court “…had a clean end. It never lived to be a ruin.”
Place encourages the lyrical in both writers. Here, from the novel Two Days in Aragon, is Molly on the eponymous house:
“Aragon stood high above a tidal river. So high and so near that there was only a narrow kind of garden between house and water. It was almost a hanging garden: as Spanish as the strange name Aragon…Beauty so correct and satisfactory since then there has never been; nor so much dignity with so little heaviness…It was the quietest, most solemn garden. The parliaments of rooks in the woods below, only an echo here, a ring for the circle of the quiet.”
Bowen can be more spare, but no less evocative. This, from her last novel, is her depiction of where Eva Trout lived – the house called Larkins”:
“Larkins was set in plum orchards, of which acres extended on three sides. The house was itself built of plum-coloured brick. Square, two-storeyed, five sash windows in front (three above, two below) with a door in the middle, it was not unlike a house in a child’s drawing. Its gaze was forthright.”
And Larkins was not unlike, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, the “…great stone box…” personalised by Bowen in her important social and family history, the book Bowen’s Court. “A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen’s Court…” she said. …”Since then…Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.” Written between 1939 and 1941, at the height of the war, Bowen’s Court is family chronicle with a literary sense – superb story and subversive history. The story is of individual Bowens in each generation, the family, the ancestral home, becoming almost of one substance. The subversion, as in The Last September, is in her portrayal of the Anglo-Irish life as predetermined grand tragedy: intense, emotional, inevitable – the introverted integrity of a lost cause.
Bowen has, in the book Bowen’s Court, a penetrating analysis of the life of their much grander neighbour at Mitchelstown Castle – George, third earl of Kingston. Here she is able to quite dispassionately pick her class to pieces. Writing of the lunacy that afflicted the earl in 1833, Elizabeth captures the whiff of decay that already clung to the southern Anglo-Irish:
“…he epitomises that rule by force of sheer fantasy that had, in great or small ways, become for his class the only possible one. From the big lord to the small country gentlemen we were, about this time, being edged back upon a tract of clouds and obsessions that could each, from its nature, only be solitary. The sense of dislocation was everywhere. Property was still there, but power was going. It was democracy, facing him in his gallery, that sent Big George mad.”
Note the “we”: Elizabeth Bowen lived and worked in two separate worlds – a cosmopolitan literary England; and a decaying, brittle, often shallow Anglo-Ireland. Each impacted on the other, but her Anglo-Irish life had a pervasive influence on her perspective; Bowen wrote as an outsider. This “death of the heart” of her caste infused her work and informed the attenuation and malaise of many of her characters.
Love, for both ladies, was central to their lives and their writing. For Elizabeth Bowen, it was an essential part of her religious belief: it is said that she could not imagine a God who would not accept love as the reason for human departure from any strictly laid down code. This formula stood her in good stead during all the years with Cameron. The second world war loosened the bonds of morality further – but Elizabeth was always of “good behaviour”. She felt that the war was “…the most interesting period of my life…”, and she is certainly one of the finest evokers of the Blitz. Her short piece, London, 1940, with its chilling, one-line paragraph ending – “We have no feelings to spare” – will tell you all you need to know of a time which few of us could ever imagine experiencing. She, at least, had some ‘”feelings to spare”: in 1941 the hothouse live-for-the-day atmosphere of London encouraged an intense relationship with the urbane Canadian diplomat, Charles Ritchie. Ritchie was, possibly, the true passion of Bowen’s life; she was certainly his. The attachment to Bowen, he wrote in 1942, “…will bind me as long as I live…” and, though later married, he continued to be an intimate friend right up to her death. The novel The Heat of the Day, published in 1949 and dedicated to Ritchie, was based on their affair.
For Molly Keane, love seemed to have begun and ended with her perfect man – a gentleman farmer, “Bobbie” Keane, nephew of Senator Sir John Keane. Molly’s characteristic description of a passionate relationship, which started in 1933, was that “…in those days it wasn’t done – but of course it was done”. They married in 1938. Keane was Molly’s ideal – a beautiful rider, witty, intelligent. He encouraged her to take writing seriously. She was devastated when, following relatively routine surgery, he died in 1946.
Bowen’s marriage, on the other hand, could hardly have been described as anything but bizarre. Perhaps, as she said in 1935, marriage “…appeared an achievement or way of making one’s mark, also… it would be difficult to settle to anything else until this was done.” The marriage provided domestic stability as counterpoint to her frenetic literary and social life. Thus, life with Alan Cameron – a decorated war hero and an intelligent administrator with a deliberate line in boring stories – was internally rationalised, while at the same time remaining an enigma to her friends. Bowen, it must be said, was discreet about her affairs and Cameron seemingly tolerated them.
For both writers, the necessity to make money is a constant backdrop. In Keane’s case, it was the spur to a remarkable literary renaissance in her late seventies. The lasting grief which Bobbie’s death occasioned had been reflected in her virtual cessation of writing from the late 1940s until the 1970s, but she returned spectacularly to the literary scene at the age of 77 with the novel Good Behaviour. Written when, as she said, she was “too old to ride to hounds, too poor to pay a gardener, but possessed of a rattling good idea”, it was completed in 1978. The manuscript, however, was initially rejected by Collins, which had been her publishers. Dame Peggy Ashcroft, a friend, persuaded her to persevere and it was published in 1981 by Andre Deutsch to critical acclaim, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year. It’s a black Protestant comedy. It offsets pathos and glittering success against a vision of the Anglo-Irish milieu as one of solitude, poverty, hopelessness and futility – but always of good behaviour. It was successfully adapted for television by Hugh Leonard in 1983.
Keane, in Polly Devlin’s marvellous phrase, “…observed and preserved…the sounding of the tocsins and the minutiae of the last days of the Irish Raj…”. But her writings, especially in their later phase, are not just stories of a vanished culture. There is a contemporary-feeling satire, which strikes a chord with a generation of readers too young to have a familiarity with the Anglo-Irish universe within which she moved. There was a more than a soupcon of acid, though; not particularly disguising the origins of many of her characters, she doubtless created the odd thought of lucrative libel actions in south of Ireland Big House drawing rooms. Her last novel, Loving and Giving, published in 1988, mirrors Bowen’s Eva Trout (1969) with its shocking, violent end. Once again the themes are the Anglo-Irish gentry’s conflation of place with person and its obligation to stifle any acknowledgement of the untoward.
Fuelled by the necessity to make a living from her craft, Bowen’s prodigious output in the late forties and early fifties consisted largely of workaday pieces – articles, broadcasts, criticisms, introductions, prefaces, reviews, and travelogues. Her 80 or so short stories – described as “brilliant” by Angus Wilson – and I agree – were of more even quality than her novels. She does shorter, better. The subjects were diverse, ranging through wartime London, children, hotels – and ghosts; spectacularly, a long evening glove comes alive in her 1965 short story Hand in Glove, and commits murder. A history of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel appeared in 1951, which is probably the closest she got, both in a physical and literary sense, to the Kildare Street Club!
Cameron, ill and alcoholic for a long time, died in 1952. The last of the typical Bowenesque novels, and also her final wholly Irish-centred fiction, A World of Love, was published in 1955. Its “darkened mirror” – her own phrase – reflected Bowen’s preoccupations at the time about money, a shabby Irish house and a shabbier heroine. She had stayed on in Bowen’s Court, stacking up financial problems as a generous hostess of the Big House. Attempts to keep it in the family failing, it was eventually sold to a local farmer. Bowen thought it would be lived in again, with children. But it was not to be. To her dismay, it was demolished in 1960. Nevertheless, she continued to be a frequent visitor to friends in Ireland. And, according to Charles Ritchie, she was not afraid to revisit the site of the house.
Bowen’s attitude to political Ireland always seemed ambivalent. If her observation-point as a writer was, in Hermione Lee’s phrase, as the “…spy inside the gates…” this was mirrored in her wartime role as a journalist for the British Ministry of Information. Moving between London and Bowen’s Court, she conveyed Irish opinion to the ministry; the Colonial Secretary, Lord Cranborne, found her reports “sensible and well-balanced”. This episode in particular has led the anti-revisionist movement to brand her as little more than a traitor. She was nothing of the sort, of course. To many southern Protestants, Ireland continued to be seen primarily as a country rather than a nation, and it would not have seemed strange to Bowen, in what she said were “…the perpetual transits…” across the Irish Sea between Anglo and Irish, to maintain a dual loyalty without any particular sense of strain.
The demolition of the house, though, rather than its sale, seems to have hardened her heart. In 1963, in the second edition of Bowen’s Court, the best she could say about the Treaty, over 40 years after its signature, was that “I believe in its promise”. Just before her death, she surprised Hubert Butler by vehemently exclaiming that “I hate Ireland”, though Butler felt that it was her illness talking.
Both Bowen and Keane tried their hand at writing for the stage, Keane being conspicuously more successful. Bowen’s single unpublished play, Castle Anna (1948) was notable only for Richard Burton’s debut. Keane’s were Cowardesque, with fine characterisation and pointed wit. Many were produced by John Gielgud. Spring Meeting (1938), Guardian Angel (1944) and Treasure Hunt (1949) were mildly fashionable for their time, while Ducks and Drakes (1942) and Dazzling Prospect (1961), were not, the latter – in a post-John Osborne world – being particularly out of place. The hostile reception afforded to Dazzling Prospect was one of the subsidiary reasons why Keane was reluctant to take up the pen for years afterwards.
The later life of both writers is a contrast in stability. Keane returned to Ireland in 1952 on completion of her daughters’ education, moving to a small but beautifully-positioned clifftop house in Ardmore, Co Waterford. In later years, she achieved a recognition that was not able to be hers in earlier. She was feted in her adopted county and elected a founder member of Aosdána in 1981 (which provided a small, but valuable, stipend). She died at home, following a fall, in April 1996 and lies in the churchyard of St Paul’s Church of Ireland, Ardmore.
Bowen, on the other hand, led an itinerant existence after the sale of Bowen’s Court in 1959. Eventually, in 1965, she settled in Hythe, Kent, close to her childhood home. An establishment figure, in 1948 she had been appointed CBE and subsequently lectured for the British Council abroad. She was – if a curious choice – a conscientious member of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, which was influential in leading to the eventual abolition of hanging. She lectured on the art of the novel in her many visits to American universities as writer-in-residence after the war. Two further books – The Little Girls in 1964; and Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes in 1969 – saw greater physicality and action. Eva Trout was shortlisted for the Booker and awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1970. Elizabeth had been a heavy smoker all her life. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1972. With Ritchie present, she died in February 1973. She is buried, with Cameron, in Farahy Churchyard, Co Cork, beside the site of Bowen’s Court.
Of the two, Bowen has to be considered the greater writer. Influenced by James, Proust and Woolf, she has a secure place in the canon of literature in English, a significant bridge between the Bloomsbury set and later writers like Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell and Muriel Spark, and with echoes of the American novelist Edith Wharton. She may have wanted to establish herself as an English, even a European, novelist: but one of her best novels – “which of all my books” she said “is nearest my heart” – is still The Last September, her most overtly Irish; and she knew it. In it, her ear is perfect, her sense of place confident, her tone elegiac. There is little of the unconfident angst expressed by a character in Lennox Robinson’s play The Big House, set in 1921-23: “we were ashamed of everything, ashamed of our birth, ashamed of our good education, ashamed of our religion, ashamed that we dined in the evenings, and that we dressed for dinner”. There may have been relative poverty at Bowen’s Court – in an eerie echo of Lennox Robinson, Virginia Woolf in 1934 described the Camerons as “….keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on…” – but there was never shame.
If Bowen is a novelist who, in the ultimate, writes of the generic human condition, Keane represents a different image, chronicling a specific Anglo-Irish world. In a fit of self-parody in her 1934 book Devoted Ladies, she describes herself as
“…some hysterical Irish novelist, writing her seventy thousand words through which the cry of hounds reverberates continuously, where masters of hounds are handsome and eligible men and desirable young women override hounds continually, seeing brilliant hunts on incredible three-year-olds; and all – after even the hardest day – are capable of strong emotion at night.”
She even has a character in the book describe her own 1928 novel Young Entry as “…full of the lowing of hounds and everyone stuffing themselves with buttermilk scones dripping with butter”. Her fiction is contrarian in a way that Bowen’s is not. Molly considered herself an iconoclast in both her view of Ireland and her personal life – “…a great old breaker-awayer…”, as she described herself in an interview in the New Yorker.
There is a subtle difference of atmosphere between the two writers. It is not easy to pin down, but perhaps best analogised by seeing Bowen’s work as Art Nouveau – organic, flowing, inconclusive. Keane, on the other hand, is more Art Deco – angular, decorative and mysteriously functional.
Both are, in somewhat different senses, the literary children of Edith Somerville and Violet Martin. With Keane, the genealogy is perhaps more obvious, her surrealism and her Big House settings reflecting the Irish RM and similar stories. The substantial literary line, for both writers, though, runs from Somerville and Ross’s best and most serious books – The Real Charlotte and The Big House of Inver. Keane’s blackish humours and sharp characterisation, and Bowen’s treatment of the timeless traits of desire, greed, hubris, ennui, are all founded in these earlier works.
In conclusion, I can do no better than paraphrase two critics’ verdicts: Mary Gordon, in the New York Times, sums up Keane’s early novels as “…brilliant evocations of a world that strained to combine, to its peril, the old way of life that centred on hunting and the foreign modern influences of cocktails, homosexuality, adultery and inappropriate fur coats…”, while Hermione Lee says that Bowen demands attention not just because of her literary ancestry (Jane Austen, Henry James, the Anglo-Irish and French novelists), but more so because of her mastery of a singular style, her sense of place, her brilliance as a short story writer, her creation of troubled, complicated, modern characters. Her obsessions, too, lend sharp focus to her stories – betrayal, the supernatural, war life, the perceptions of children – and above all, the dislocation and dispossession of an entire society.
Today, anyone who undertakes a pilgrimage to Farahy Churchyard will now only sense ghosts. Elizabeth Bowen’s grave crouches for shelter against a westering wall. Close by, the wind shakes the barley where once stood the “great stone box” of Bowen’s Court. Nothing is left. Can the Anglo-Irish way of life, then, be characterised, at the last, as no more than an illusion? Perhaps. But if the rot had long set from within, if there was little but an empty shell, we are indebted to these “devoted ladies”, whose literary craft has, in effect, placed a preservation order upon it. A new, a higher reality has been created. And thus is captured, by Elizabeth Bowen, a garden party at Mitchelstown Castle on August 5th, 1914 – otherwise unexceptional, but preserved, like a fly in amber, in the book Bowen’s Court. “Wind raced round the Castle terraces, naked under the Galtees; grit blew into the ices; the band clung with some trouble to its exposed place”. Here, the flower of north Cork Anglo-Irish society met, “this first day of the war”, incongruously doing what it did best – Elizabeth’s “comings-and-goings, entertainments”. Here, despite an unknown and impending catastrophe, in the introverted miniature worlds of The Last September and Mad Puppetstown, the landed classes are still weaving an intricate social filigree and indulging, amongst themselves, in a “narcissism of small differences”. Here, though, with a superior hindsight, we can see this life as at the cusp of its finest hour. And here, appropriately in Bowen’s words, we take our leave of that reality, that illusion:
“The unseen descent of the sun behind the clouds sharpens the bleak light; the band, having throbbed out God Save the King, packs up its wind-torn music and goes home.”
This essay was first presented as a talk given at the Kildare Street and University Club, Dublin. Ian d’Alton is a historian who has been researching southern Irish Protestantism for over forty years, latterly through the medium of the literary. He is the author of Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812-1844 (Cork UP, 1980).
