“Too much time”: time, women and “elsewhere” in Elizabeth Bowen’s A Time in Rome

Abstract

ABSTRACT A Time in Rome, the only work of travel writing by Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), has been dismissed as an incoherent, fragmented account, offering neither a comprehensive guide to the capital nor insight into Bowen’s personal experience. Paying careful attention to Bowen’s use of time in the text, though, reveals a sense of the temporal that resonates with some theories set forth by Nietzsche and Bergson, whose views of the untimely and durée had an impact on some Modernist authors’ works. Bowen’s writing reveals her interest in uncovering a multiplicity of pasts and recovered histories in the capital city. Further, using Elizabeth Grosz’s theories on the feminist possibilities of Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s perspectives of time helps illuminate how Bowen’s text presents new spaces for women’s experience of time, memory and history in her travel writing, opening out new possibilities for alternative futures for women.