A World of Love

Description

In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth.

In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living."In the first rank of the brilliant women writers."–The New York Times

"In A World of Love Miss Bowen’s powers are at their summit…perception, wit, and beauty flash from every page."–The New York Times Book Review

"One of the handful of great English novelists of [her] century."–The Washington Post

"Bowen writes beautifully–sometimes, in fact, so beautifully it hurts."—Time
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. Her book Bowen’s Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house, in County Cork. Throughout her life, she divided her time between London and Bowen’s Court, which she inherited. She wrote many acclaimed novels and short story collections, was awarded the CBE in 1948, and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973.I

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 the 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. The month was June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late wakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast. At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland’s amazement at being cloudless.

Out in front of the house, on a rise of rough grass, somewhat surprisingly stood an obelisk; which, now outlined by the risen sun, cast towards Montefort its long shadow — only this connected the lordly monument with the dwelling. For the small mansion had an air of having gone down: for one thing, trees had been felled around it, leaving space impoverished and the long low roofline framed by too much sky. The door no longer knew hospitality; moss obliterated the sweep for the turning carriage; the avenue lived on as a rutted track, and a poor fence, close up to the house, served to keep back wandering grazing cattle. Had the facade not carried a ghost of style, Montefort would have looked, as it almost did, like nothing more than the annexe of its farm buildings — whose slipshod gables and leaning sheds, flaking whitewash and sagging rusty doors made a patchwork for some way out behind. A stone archway, leading through to the stables and nobly canopied by a chestnut tree, sprang from the side of the house and was still imposing.

Montefort stood at a right-angle to the nearby gorge, towards which it presented a blind end — though in this the vestige of a sealed-up Venetian window was to the traced. In its day the window had overlooked the garden which, broken-walled, still projected over the river view. A way zigzagged steeply down through thickets and undergrowth to the water’s edge: the cliff arose from the water, opposite.

The half-asleep face of Montefort was at this hour drowned in early light.

A girl came out of the house, and let herself through the gate in the fence. Wearing a trailing Edwardian muslin dress, she stepped out slowly towards the obelisk, shading her eyes. She walked first up the shadow then round the base of the monument: this bore no inscription and had been polished only by rubbing cattle, whose hoofs had left a bald-trodden circle in the grass. Having come to a stand-still, she drew a breath, propped an elbow on a convenient ledge of the stone and, leaning, began to re-read a letter; or, rather, ponder over what she seemed more than half to know by heart. Afterwards, refolding the letter, she took a long look round at all the country, as though following one deep draught up with one of another kind. Kindled by summer though cool in nature, she was a beauty. The cut of her easy golden hair was anachronistic over the dress she wore: this, her height and something half naive half studied about her management of the sleeves and skirts made her like a boy actor in woman’s clothes, while what was classical in her grace made her appear to belong to some other time. Her brows were wide, her eyes an unshadowed blue, her mouth more inclined to smile than in any other way to say very much — it was a face perfectly ready to be a woman’s, but not yet so, even in its transcendency this morning. She was called Jane and was twenty years old. All at once, stepping clear of the obelisk, she looked intently back at the house behind her, and in particular at two adjoining windows in the top storey. Across those, however, curtains were still drawn.

Inside the room, in the mantled claret-red dusk, nothing was in movement except the bluebottle now bumping buzzing against the ceiling. Here or there, sun spattered the carpet, rents in the curtains let through what were to be when the sleeper woke shafts of a brightness quite insupportable. The fourposter, of a frame immense, was overdraped with more of the damask stuff: at one side the hangings were tucked back to allow access to things on the bedside table — a packet of Gold Flake, a Bible, a glass with dregs, matches, sunglasses, sleeping pills, a nail file and a candlestick caked with wax into which the finished wick had subsided. A damaged Crown Derby saucer held strawberry husks, cigarette stubs, ash: some uneaten strawberries sweetly tainted the already unfresh surrounding air. The bed-end had during the night become a cascade of twisted rejected blankets; feather pillows too had been flung away — triumphant the sleeper now lay dead flat, flat out. A sheet traced the declivities of her body; her upturned face seemed to be sealed by the resolution never, if so it might be, to wake at all.

But the door opened; a step caught a creaking floorboard. A big blonde woman inched herself in then halted, with a look at once of uncertainty and affront. ‘Oh, then you’re still asleep,’ she at last said. The door swung and clicked on its latch behind her, and though she jumpily gave it a backward glance she seemed glad to have the decision made — advancing further into the room she began to pick feathers from the carpet, sighing and supporting her bust with one arm. Having thus arrived near the dressing-table she straightened up, put back some wisps of hair in front of the glass, and, as though egged on by her reflection, more loudly said: I said, so you’re still asleep.’

The other woman shuddered from top to toe, then started to strangle with morning couching. She reared her head up blindly, finished the bout, then flopped back again, instinctively dragging with her a bed-curtain which she wound round her in a tent, in whose depths she vainly tried to submerge. Giving up, she asked in a charnel tone: ‘What is it?’

‘What o’clock, do you mean?’

‘No. What do you want?’

‘I wondered if Jane was in here.’

‘Is she?’

‘No. So I’ve no idea where she’s gone. However, it was only that Fred keeps asking. — Did you know your pillow was shedding, one of your pillows? I wonder which,’

‘Then do take the whole bang lot away!– No, not now! (for the other approached the bed) later on, Lilia, for heaven’s sake!’

Lilia continued, however, to search the lair with her large blue heavily-vacant eyes. ‘And how are you this morning?’ she asked unhopefully.

‘Oh, fresh as a daisy, thank you — as you can see.’

‘Oh.’

‘And you?’ reluctantly croaked the other.

‘After yesterday, how can you ask, Antonia?’

‘What happened yesterday?’

‘The Fete.’

‘So it did. So you mean now you’re dead.’

‘In this heat how can I know what I am? Merely that Fete was the last straw — oh, imagine having to go to that! After those shoes also my feet are torture; but chiefly it is this everlasting buzzing inside my head, not to speak of waking drenching with perspiration. And in this heat this house gets more dreadful day after day. However–‘ Lilia turned her attention to the bedside table. ‘It looks to me,’ she said in a brisker tone, ‘as though you’d again gone to sleep with your candle burning. Only look at it. Did you?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I lie sleepless, sometimes, picturing you in flames. — Done with this glass, have you?’

‘If it’s empty.’

‘Then I think I might as well take it down. And this fruit seems to have started bringing in flies.’ Lilia reached for the glass, then for the saucer, then was struck by a thought. ‘But now that leaves you nowhere for your ash. I know what I’ll do, I’ll send Maud up with another.’

‘No, don’t do that, Lilia! Don’t let Maud in!’

‘Maud has come out in hives.’

‘Not Jane, too, I hope?’

‘The child over-ate at the Fete, then brought home more. You never ought to have given her that money. — No, I said, I haven’t seen Jane this morning, any more than anyone else seems to have done. As I said, that’s why Fred’s in a state — it seems she yesterday said she’d be sure to go out with him to his hay this morning. He can’t or won’t believe she could break a promise. “Well, I’m sorry for you,” I said, “but what ever do you expect after that Fete and staying there late dancing?” However, no, she’s not asleep in her room. — Now you are awake, I suppose you will want your tea?’

‘In a minute, if it could come up calmly.’

‘Come up what?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Well I do mind, because I heard what you said. I can only say I am doing more than I can, night and day attempting always to have this, that and the other the way you want it, and if you’re still not satisfied I am sorry. No one would be gladder than I would if things ran smoothly, but if you had ever attempted to keep this old terrible house, you would just see. Do you think I for a moment ever forget you have every right to be satisfied when you choose to come here? What upsets me is –‘

‘–Lilia! Not at this hour!’

‘You don’t yet even know what o’clock it is.’

‘I do know it’s not the o’clock for this.’

‘Oh, very well,’ replied Lilia. ‘By all means. Just as you like.’ She added the candlestick to the glass and saucer and, keeping the pyramid they formed in precarious balance against her bosom, proceeded through the tricky dusk to the door — her form, the exhausted mauve of her cotton dress, by turns appearing opaque or ghostly. She was electing to move, as she sometimes did, with a sort of superior smoothness, as though trollied. Antonia lay watching suspiciously, then shot up. — ‘Hi, stop! You’re not taking away my matches?’

This caused a halt, once again on the creaking board.

‘As I never touch anything without first asking, your matches should be where they were. Aren’t they?’

‘No idea where they were.’

‘If you want to know, I can see them even from here.’ Lilia shifted her burden, set her right arm free and with it majestically pointed. The arm–white, soft skinned, still remarkably shapely — stayed outstretched, with unquivering forefinger, while Antonia, scuffling around the curtain, came on the matchbox, shook it and relapsed with a grunt.

‘Quite right. Oh, thank you. So sorry.’

‘Will that be all?’

Antonia, lighting a cigarette, sent a glance after the closing door.

Lilia, wife of Fred Danby, mother of Jane and Maud, was half the hostess at Montefort, half not. There were times — of which this morning was one — when she felt either galled or weighed upon by the ambiguity. The fact was that Antonia owned the place, which had come to her upon the death of a cousin, and that the Danbys’ status here was uncertain, never secure, never defined. They were not her tenants, for they paid no rent; neither were they her caretakers, for they drew no salary. Fred farmed the land, and paid across to Antonia a half share of such profits as could be made; he and his family lived in the house for nothing, the best room in it being kept for Antonia to occupy when and how she chose. Of this arrangement it had not yet been decided whether it did or did not work, still less if it were equitable or, if not so, not so at whose expense. One could only say, it had lasted for twenty-one years, owing perhaps partly to all parties’ reluctance to sitting down and having anything out, or to binding themselves to anything hard-and-fast, or to thinking out anything better. Antonia shrank from bother; Fred worked too hard to have time for more, and Lilia’s brooding attitude was ambivalent — she disliked Montefort, wilted under the life here, but had ceased to more than dream of escape. As she saw it, here were herself and Fred kept dangling upon Antonia’s caprices; as against which, here was their patroness yearly drifting more into their debt and power. If the Danbys were to walk out — though indeed, to where?– Antonia would have to grapple with the decision she had so far staved off: whether to part with Montefort or to take it over. Her overweening sentiment for the place went, as her cousin’s had done before her, with neither wish nor ability to remain here always. Her visits were sudden and on the whole far apart; being more and more timed, of later years, to coincide with Jane’s returns home. The cost of Jane’s education — first at expensive boarding school, then abroad, lately at a select London secretarial college — had been met by Antonia: who knew how? Jane could now be held to be qualified for her first post: what it should be or when she should take it up was not yet decided . . . Maud, the second daughter, lived at home and attended the local Protestant school.

The relationship of the Danbys to Antonia was puzzling until one knew the story. Guy, one-time owner of Montefort, Antonia’s first cousin and dear ally, had, when he fell in battle early in 1918, been engaged to Lilia — at seventeen a wonderful golden willow of a girl. That enchanting love-on-a-leave, that idealization undoomed — as he probably knew — ever to fade so far failed to connect in Guy with outside reality that he had forgotten to make a Will. When he was killed, therefore, any money he had went, together with Montefort, to Antonia, who apart from anything else was his next of kin. The fiancee was left unprovided for. Antonia had felt this unfair, as it more than was. Unwilling to profit by Guy’s oversight, she sought out Lilia, whom she had yet to meet. Lilia, already so dazed by Guy as to be only a shade more stupefied by his death, was indeed in a bad way — whirled by the courtship out of her natural sphere (suburbia merging into the Thames Valley), untrained to work and now not disposed to try, unfitted to take up life again with her own people, with whom Guy, it transpired, had made bad blood. Ill met, since this was the outcome, had Guy been by the ballroom blue moonlight of Maidenhead. It was clear, Lilia did not know where to turn. Had she been left alone, which she was not, life yet might have forced her on to her own feet: there could have been benefit, at this crisis, from a no more than discreet and limited aid. But Antonia had not known where to stop, and never had intervention proved more fatal. Instead of giving Lilia a sum down or arranging to make her a fixed allowance, she had ended by virtually adopting this girl of all but her own age. Endlessly was she to involve herself with the incurably negative destiny of this person: there she was, saddled with Lilia for what looked like always. Pushed off into a series of occupations, placed in vain in a series of gift shops, tea shops, brought in vain to the notice of likely friends, Lilia came bobbing back again like a thing on water. Blight had cut short her early beauty, apathy mildewed what might have remained, and her dependence upon Antonia more and more went with a profound mistrust. Still worse, Antonia’s unevenly-curbed dislike completed the demoralization Guy’s heady love then speedy death had begun. This had gone on till Lilia was nearly thirty; when Antonia, at her wits’ end, had decided to marry her off to Fred.US

Additional information

Weight	5.5504 oz
Dimensions	0.3600 × 5.2000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Anchor
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09781400031054
ISBN-10	1400031052
Author	Elizabeth Bowen
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC008000
Subjects	historical romance, chick lit, WWII, WW2, short stories, world war ii, saga, love story, collection, modernism, family life, literary fiction, novels, Cold War, contemporary romance, FIC008000, english literature, dutch, world war 1, fiction books, books fiction, romance novels, realistic fiction books, gifts for nurses, drama, england, historical, war, crime, marriage, relationships, family, modern, classic, school, romance, love, Literature, FIC045000, fiction, mystery, Friendship, grief, death, families, coming of age, book club books, roman, 20th century