“Lucid Abnormality”: The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen on the Homefront in World War II

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was maybe the greatest short story writer in English that you might not have read. In this Delve, we will read the two dozen stories she wrote describing life in London and throughout Britain during World War II. She describes a world coming apart at its most intimate level—the homes, the lives in the houses, and the loss of home and community when the imperial capital became a bombing target during the Blitz. London was, she wrote, a city of “shock-stopped clocks.” The city she tells us about became a place of fear but also of unexpected liberties, full of love, sex, and passions. In this gothic atmosphere of haunted townscapes, people encounter vast changes in their society, as the old order is removed and will gave way to a new society. Of particular interest are Bowen’s narrations of the passage and the stopping of time in these circumstances. “We all lived,” she wrote, “in a state of lucid abnormality.” Throughout, she looks at history: what it makes of us, what we make of it, and how we tell our own experiences in its large frame. As a master of the genre, Bowen’s consummate skill was at its peak as she unveils the mysteries and depths of our lives as they go on amidst and despite crises in stories that are both unexpected and eerily familiar. We will read these stories, comprising about 200pp., in the Everyman edition of her Collected Stories.

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Collected Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (Everyman Edition)

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