Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Novel

Abstract This essay examines the engagement of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen with the works of Jane Austen. Through a reading of Bowen’s extensive critical writing on Austen as well as of her second novel, The Last September (1929), the essay demonstrates how Bowen’s engagement with Austen shaped her own writing and conception of the novel, particularly with regard to the use of dialogue and the depiction of Englishness. The essay also briefly considers the ways in which this process is exemplary of broader developments in the period.