Introduction: Thinking in/about Bowen

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen’s first short story, ‘Breakfast’ (1923), begins with a thought: ‘“Behold, I die daily,” thought Mr Rossiter, entering the breakfast-room.’1 It is a story primarily structured by thought: Mr Rossiter says very little, and the reader is privy to his reflections on the odious people with whom he must daily share his morning meal. The emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity is a typically modernist move, as is the story’s sense of a ‘life in death’, its allusion, perhaps, to the end of the second canto of ...