‘One Is Somehow Suspended’: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and the Spaces in Between

Abstract

This chapter compares Bowen to Katherine Mansfield. Neither English nor Irish, but a hybrid of both, Bowen, like Mansfield, does not belong to one country, existing instead in an unstable, liminal sphere between the two. Bowen’s admiration for Mansfield has been well-documented, and while she was undoubtedly influenced by Mansfield’s style, technique and talent, this chapter foregrounds a deeper connection between the two authors in their shared, fractured histories, and in the effect that this had on their writing. Charting the persistence of in-between spaces across the work of Bowen and Mansfield, the chapter considers the way in which the use of such spaces by the two writers not only signifies their shared histories of hybridity and dislocation, but also enables them to interrogate the shifting position of women in modernity. The chapter sketches out a taxonomy of such spaces in Bowen and Mansfield’s narratives, and in doing so reveals the dialogues operating across the writings of these authors through the spaces of the in between.