Word: bowen
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...Elizabeth Bowen; Alfred A. Knopf...
...World of Love, Bowen really seems to take the part of skillful puppeteer. She does not ask that the reader believe in the puppets which are her characters. In fact, she manipulates them without attempting to hide herself behind a partition; instead, she is in full view, showing her audience the mastery of her art. If the observer cares to enlarge the puppets' actions into universal concepts, that...
Such a book is Elizabeth Bowen A World of Love. It deals principally with the effect of past passion on a hermetically sealed group of people, living in an ancient, decaying Irish castle. These five people, two young girls, their father and mother and the fortyish divorced woman who owns the castle--all are singularly purposeless. They neither concern themselves with the world at large, nor wish to, until the eldest daughter, Jane, finds a packet of love letters in a dusty trunk in the attic. This event, of course, changes all their lives, for the author of these billet...
...Only Bowen's style, then, makes A World of Love an above average work. As her opening description of the countryside around the Irish castle, she writes: "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 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. This...
...WORLD OF LOVE, by Elizabeth Bowen (224 pp.; Knopt; $3.50), is not a tempest but a great calm in a teapot. In the attic of a ramshackle Irish country house, adrift in the summer doldrums, a beautiful girl finds a batch of old love letters. Their author-a dashing young man, dead these many decades, to whom the girl's mother was once engaged-now comes strangely to life. Around his memory, three women begin to dance slowly, lazily, like tired butterflies: the young girl, who falls in love with the shade she raised; the mother, scatterbrained and scatterhearted...