Elizabeth Bowen - The Bazaar and Other Stories

Layout 1 ELIZABETH BOWEN The Bazaar and Other Stories EDITED BY ALLAN HEPBURN Edinburgh University PressEdited with an Introduction byAllan Hepburn

Curtis Brown Ltd, London, Literary Executors of The Estate ofElizabeth Bowen 2008

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, EdinburghSelection and Editorial material Allan Hepburn 2008

Typeset in Weiss

A CIP record for this book is availablefrom the British Libraryby Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northamptonand printed and bound in Great Britainby Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, WiltsISBN 978 0 7486 3571 9 (hardback)ISBN 978 0 7486 3572 6 (paperback)AcknowledgementsvUncollected Short StoriesSalon des Dames29Unpublished and Unfinished Short StoriesThe Bazaar217Notes350Works Cited376vCollecting the stories in this volume required the faithand perseverance of many people in far-flung places. Two researchassistants, Robin Feenstra and Liisa Stephenson, indefatigablylocated materials and helped me to proofread the entire book aloud;offering astute comments on the nature of editing, they detectedimplausibilities where I suspected none. Phyllis Lassner andShannon Wells-Lassagne shared their vast knowledge aboutElizabeth Bowen with me on numerous occasions; I have beenblessed by their insight and scholarly generosity. A month-longMellon Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research

Center at the University of Texas at Austin enabled completion ofthis book. Further research funds came from the Arts Insightsprogram in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University and the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; invaluablesupport from these sources helped me to hire research assistants,secure permissions for this volume, and travel to the British Library,the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Durham University Library.Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press, a champion of thisproject from beginning to end, has made every step of the processdelightful. By supporting this project, Camilla Hornby at CurtisBrown in London, literary executors for the estate of ElizabethBowen, kindly assisted with negotiations for permissions andthereby ensured that these stories would, deservedly, come to publicattention. I wish to thank Bowens estate in particular for allowingme to proceed with this project.

IntroductionAlthough she wrote short stories throughout her life,Elizabeth Bowen never collected all of them into volumes. Owing toindifference or forgetfulness, she omitted at least twenty-eight talesfrom the books of short fiction that she assembled over the courseof her career. These stories are gathered here for the first time. Twoof them rank among her most accomplished: The Lost Hope andFlowers Will Do. Others, especially Salon des Dames, TheBazaar, Miss Jolley Has No Plans for the Future, and Women inLove, afford insight into Bowens technique and preoccupations.Despite the fact that some of these stories remain unfinished, theyall demonstrate a command of characterisation, atmosphere, andsituation that few other modernist short story writers possess. Thebest of these stories unfold miniature dramas in an intensely visuallanguage.

After abandoning her studies in fine art at the London CountyCouncil School of Art starting in 1919, she attended for two terms

Bowen devoted herself with complete absorption to writing shortstories. Her first two books, Encounters (1923) and Ann Lees and OtherStories (1926), led to a series of dazzling collections: Joining Charlesand Other Stories (1929), The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934), Look atAll Those Roses (1941), and The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945).Her short story production peaked in the 1930s and early 1940s,then slowed after the Second World War. As her productivity as ashort story writer declined, her productivity as an essayist rose.From the late 1940s onward, magazine editors solicited essays fromher on diverse subjects. Despite the energy that writing essaysdemanded, Bowen, to satisfy publishers and readers who clamouredfor her fiction, repackaged old stories with new. Selected Stories (1946)prepared the way for a reprint of Early Stories (1951), a volume thatjoins together all of the tales in Encountersand Ann Lees. Theanthology, Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (1959), included a sampling ofthe best stories, but no new work. The last volume published duringher lifetime, A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965), mixed fiverelatively new stories (four had appeared in magazines) with fifteenreprinted works. Even after Bowens death in February 1973,previously printed stories were shuffled according to thematicconnections, as happened with Irish Stories (1978).

Bowen often published the same story in several places in orderto maximise its exposure. For example, the story entitled No. 16,about a young female poet who visits an ailing male writer, firstappeared in the

Listener in January 1939, then was reprinted in themagazine Living Age in September 1939. Subsequently it wascollected in Look at All Those Roses. Thereafter, No. 16 appeared inStories by Elizabeth Bowen and A Day in the Dark. It was reprinted a sixthand last time in the posthumous volume, The Collected Stories of ElizabethBowen (1981). With an introduction by Angus Wilson, The CollectedStories slots all the works in Encounters, Ann Lees, Joining Charles, The CatJumps, Look at All Those Roses, and The Demon Lover by decade. Wilson,paying homage to his friend, praises Bowen for the instinctiveformal vision (7) and witty (8) representations of families and loveaffairs that make her stories unique. No fugitive pieces from news papers or magazines are included in The Collected Stories.

Understanding that one short story could have many incar nations, Bowen also sold her stories to international markets.Business correspondence with her literary agents, Curtis Brown,indicates a brisk trade in Danish, German, Japanese, French, Greek,and other translations of her fiction. Moreover, realising that a storycould achieve new vigour in another medium, she sold the rightsfor radio adaptations. Bowen herself reworked an early story, TheConfidante, for broadcast in 1943 (HRC 2.3). Not normallyinclined to undertake the business of rewriting her own fiction,however, she granted others the right to adapt her works whileholding the power to veto a script should it deviate too far from theoriginal. In a letter dated 11 April 1953, she distances herself asmuch as possible from an adaptation of Pink May by Mary Jones:I should like the broadcast to be announced (if it is accepted) asbased upon the short story by Elizabeth Bowen (HRC 10.5). Theoriginal might inspire Joness adaptation but Bowen does not wantthe adaptation to be identified as her own work. Sometimes storieswere read on the air without dramatisation. Versions of The TommyCrans, Reduced, Love, Tears, Idle Tears, Telling, Songs MyFather Sang Me, and numerous other stories were broadcast on BBCradio in the UK and overseas. Although the radio market providedconstant exposure, other stories gained public notice as adaptationsfor the stage and television. Oh, Madam... had a run as a play inLondon, and The Inherited Clock was broadcast on television.

In light of the extensive publication and adaptation of Bowensstories, the omission of some works from

The Collected Stories requiresexplanation. Some stories in the present volume were written forspecific occasions at the request of editors; for this reason, Bowenmay have viewed them as journeymans labour not worth collecting.These commissioned stories presume widely divergent audiences.Brigands, included in a compilation of pieces for children calledNext page