Madam, - David Alvey (April 19th) suggests that Elizabeth Bowen should not be regarded as an Irish writer on the grounds that she spied for a foreign power against this State.
Madam, - David Alvey (April 19th) suggests that Elizabeth Bowen should not be regarded as an Irish writer on the grounds that she spied for a foreign power against this State.
The notion of national literatures will probably be with us for as long as the nation-state is with us. Whether this helps the understanding of literature itself is another question. To the extent that one does make use of the notion, the test for including a novel in a country's literature is not the politics of its author, but the extent to which it engages with the lives of people within it.
In her fine novel The Last September, set in an Anglo-Irish big house, Elizabeth Bowen does engage deeply with Irish society at a crucial moment in its history. That alone is a reason to regard the novel as part of Irish literature.
As it happens, most of the Anglo-Irish people in that novel seem to be crypto-nationalists, at least in their personal sympathies, and there are even indications of startlingly high levels of anglophobia among them. And as for Bowen's spying activities, these do not seem to have amounted to anything very much more sinister than sitting in the public gallery of the Dáil during a debate, and taking tea with Archbishop McQuaid.
But even if she had been less ambivalent in her political sympathies, the view that a section of her work forms part of Irish literature would not make the definition of national tradition any less coherent than it usually is. - Yours, etc.,
ANNE NOLAN,
Gresham House,
Cathal Brugha Street,
Dublin 1.