Across the Other Channel: Elizabeth Bowen and Modernist Mediation

The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen has always presented a problem to critics who have wished to place her: politically conservative but socially liberated, she lived between two countries, feeling English in Ireland and Irish in England, and was, according to her one-time lover, the writer Seán Ó Faoláin, ‘heart-cloven and split-minded’ when it came to the question of national loyalty. She is, in this sense, an intensely complex writer of mediations. This essay will argue that we must read Bowen as a trans-Channel writer, not only as a frequent traveller across the English Channel (which she was) but one who moved constantly across St George’s Channel, the body of water that separates Ireland and the United Kingdom, sometimes called the Irish Channel. In their study of the literary channel and the invention of the novel, Margaret Cohen & Carolyn Dever argue for a liminal ‘Channel zone’ between England and France, where the novel takes shape as a form. I borrow this notion of a Channel zone as a liminal place where Bowen’s novels, stories, and essays flourish, and to recognize the importance of the English Channel and the Kent coastline for Bowen while also redirecting our attention to her many movements across the other, Irish Channel. My readings of Bowen’s crossings and correspondences counter Ó Faoláin’s metaphor of the split with the logic of the fold, focusing especially on Bowen's 1935 novel The House in Paris, in order to free her from the back-and-forth motion of the Anglo-Irish binary, and to open up the many passages, connections, and encounters her work enacts.