A History of English Literature

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Newspeak remain in the mind; the hero, Winston Smith, fades. Experience in the
Burma Police had turned Blair into Orwell, who embraced a life of poverty in order
to attack injustice. He called the Left to democratic socialism and away from
communism. His essays on popular culture and on Dickens are models of plain
speaking and of the plain style.

Elizabeth Bowen

The Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen(1899–1973) can be placed with these novelists.
Educated in England, she grew up in a Big House in County Cork, experiencing
directly the disintegration of a privileged world. She told its story in Bowen’s Court
(1942), after she had failed to keep it going. The Troubles inform The Last September
(1929), in which the isolated heroine has her engagement to a young English soldier
broken off, and the house where the dining, dancing and tennis parties continue is
about to be burned down. Her detached art is compared to that ofThe Real Charlotte
(1894), the Anglo-Irish masterpiece of Sommerville and Ross.
Bowen writes of society with sensitivity and humour, implying raw emotional
truths through social nuance. Often she writes of a young woman’s loss of happiness
and innocence, as did Henry James. Her idea of a novel was ‘a non-poetic statement
ofa poetic truth’. If Woolf registers personal impressions in poetic prose, Bowen’s
conception of a novel modifies the tradition in which social externals can convey
personal relations. Her first novel,The Hotel (1927), concerns a young woman lost
among the drifters at an Italian resort. Similar themes can be found in The House in
Paris (1936) and The Death of the Heart (1938), studies in the misfortunes of the
children of extra-marital love-affairs. The last is the best-reputed of her novels,
though its painful realizations have a too visibly calculated refinement.The Heat of
the Day (1949), set in the London of the Blitz, has a Greene-like scenario of treasons,
private and public,with an attractive heroine in Stella Rodney and some hope
emerging from the wreckage. The novel is memorably atmospheric, and Bowen’s
writing is generally remarkable for its touch. She sometimes had difficulty with
plots,and was a great hand at the short story. If she is in the tradition of the Anglo-
Irish novel, one can also place her work at a mid-point between two talented
contemporaries, the frankly confessing tone of the sensitive Rosamund Lehmann
and the firmer ideas-driven fiction of ‘Rebecca West’ (1892–1983), an Anglo-
Irishwoman who took her name from the feminist heroine of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
Elizabeth Bowen did not turn her life or opinions too simply into fiction.

Fantasy Fiction

C.S.Lewis

The Ulster-born C. S. Lewis(1898–1963) was a scholar of late medieval and
Renaissance literature, the author of such vigorous works of high popularization as
The Allegory of Love(1936) and The Discarded Image.Having been an atheist, he
became a prolific Christian apologist, enjoying controversy (his father had been a
police solicitor in Belfast). He developed an other-worldly fiction in The Screwtape
Letters (1942),an infernal correspondence-course on How to Tempt, and Perelandra
(1943),one of three cosmic allegories about technology and human pride. Later,
Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed dealt honestly with experiences of love and
loss.But his The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the other ‘Narnia’ books for

374 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55

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