📚 'Rather Dated' November: Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Last September' 📚

[MotherofPearl]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading and discussing Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Last September'. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:
November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.
May: Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
June: Margaret Kennedy, The Feast.
July: Mollie Panter-Downes, One Fine Day.
August: Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April.
September: Barbara Pym, An Academic Question.
October: Dorothy Whipple, High Wages.

Link to the main thread:

📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚 http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/whatweree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

Thanks for starting the thread, @MotherofPearl

Shall I begin? I managed to read the book quite quickly as it was available immediately from the library, and I was drawn into it after a slightly slow start. I think it takes a while to adjust to Bowen's unusual use of language. I had to keep reminding myself that she was writing in the late 1920s, as it felt much more contemporary in its style to me. I loved her imagery and her technique of blending very quickly from conventional descriptive writing to highly impressionistic passages. Initially I found these quite tricky to follow if I took them literally, but I ended up allowing myself to go with the images the words conjured up for me - this seemed to allow a way into the language and I ended up loving this book.

Happy to discuss more, especially about the characters, but I’m keen to see what everyone else thinks!

Thanks for starting us off @Terpsichore. That sounds like a good way of approaching the writing. I am struggling a bit with the long passages of description, especially descriptions of the landscape, and don't feel very invested in any of the characters (and often can't make sense of their rather cryptic conversations!), but I'll keep e are descriptions that have really struck me so vivid and evocative. One that has stayed with me is

Oh dear, something went wrong and I pressed post too soon.

I was saying that I'm struggling with the novel a bit but will keep going until the end.

One passage that I found so evocative and will stay with me is the description of Francie washing her hands:

"they turned in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violet soap."

I'll post again when I get to the end.

I'm doing a quick reread and it's better second time round. I agree with Terpsichore that the prose is impressionistic in places and this throws* *the reader off a bit. The disjointed dialogues remind me of Sally Rooney's writing where you begin to feel exasperated with the characters and want them to say what they mean and not beat about the bush.

As a Cork person, I enjoyed the various references. I can confirm that the Imperial is still a posh hotel :)

I have very glad to have read this. I thought I’d read an Elizabeth Bowen title before, but I now realise I was muddling it up in my head with Molly Keane’s Two days in Aragon, which as far as I recall has a similar setting to Last September. I liked it. It wasn’t the easiest book we’ve read, and the in places I found the writing so lyrical it was hard to follow what was happening, a bit like a dream. But if I just relaxed and went with it, I was drawn along by the story. I am absolutely not any kind of Woolf expert, but from what I dimly remember of what I’ve read, this did slightly have Woolf echoes. Unlike you, @MotherofPearl, I really loved the description of the landscape, but I concede there was a lot of it! The dialogue was hard to follow at times. It took me a while to sort out who was who.
I felt very sorry for Lois. She seemed to have no independent direction of her own, and neither marriage to Gerald, or pointless art school course really seemed to be what she wanted.
The title was a giveaway I suppose, “The” last September implies that something dreadful and final happens at the end although I was not expecting Gerald’s death. There was a wistful, end of days sadness about the house I thought.

I’ve just finished it, and looking back, the impressions are cumulative, building up
a picture of the different people, Danielstown itself and the historical situation, but at the start it seems rather blurry and indistinct. Even the seemingly endless descriptions of the effects of light become stunningly meaningful on the final page. But it’s a real slow-burner.

It was striking to me how little the Anglo-Irish gentry knew about England, and how much they disliked the English (common, mannerless, lacking in delicacy/reserve etc.), and equally how oblivious they were of how they were viewed by many of their less well-off compatriots.

There's an 'Elizabeth Bowen Review' whose issues are available online, and the edition from 2019 (September, appropriately enough!) has an essay on the novel. It’s extremely academic and if nothing else confirms that I could never be a literary critic, so my poor brain has some trouble grappling with it, but I did manage to extract a definition of the literary technique we've commented on - the author of the article, Kezia Whiting, calls it Bowen's modernist free indirect style.

I think I took from it, in part, that the novel is exploring themes of isolation, unknowingness, and borders - all the characters are isolated from one another, nothing is ever quite articulated properly; indeed they actively avoid knowing.

Whiting says: In the novel the gaps and traversals of the big House parallel the simultaneous isolation and penetration of subjectivity so that the predicament of the Anglo-Irish Big House, its paradoxical isolationism and principle of hospitality, becomes the predicament of the subjects who inhabit it.

If anyone fancies a go, it’s here! Page 20.

Excellent, Terpsichore. Thank you. I feel I need a tutorial for this one.

I think this is a novel rich in detail, but where many characters are quite vague whether that's due to their circumstances and it's deliberate on the part of Bowen, I can't be sure about. I'm inclined to think so.

On a more mundane note, I was a bit surprised that Lady Nayor wasn't in favour of Lois marrying Gerald. Was it a question of status and background? The art school wasn't going to lead to anything. I think ultimately Lois was going to be expected to get married. Gerald was perfectly nice. Poor chap.

She didn’t know who his family were; they might even have been in Trade!

Shocking :) but the back of his head was so perfectly smooth.

😂😂

I had to dnf - I have it till page 83 so I gave it a fair shot! I struggled with the writing while I did like the passing comments of the violence happening which didn't seem to affect the people on the house at all

Aw Spella. I know what you mean. That's the point of it, I think. The detachment of the characters from the events happening around them.

I got there in the end. I found this a very difficult read and didn't connect at all with Bowen's writing style. There were quite big sections where I didn't really understand what was happening, or where I couldn't make sense of the characters' conversations (perhaps I'm lacking in imagination or not reading with sufficient effort!). It helped me to try to imagine it as a film, oddly.

In spite of all this, some of Bowen's descriptions were really evocative, and I feel will stay with me (like the hands/porpoises example I posted earlier).

I didn't see Gerald's death coming, and it made it feel the whole story was rather pointless. The lack of any resolution for Lois as a character was quite unsatisfying.

I was struck by what felt to me the really snobbish and rather sneering portrayal of Betty and Denise - though none of the characters are particularly sympathetically rendered.

I'm glad to have given it a go (and finished the book eventually), but I don't think I'll be rushing to read anymore Bowen.

Glad you finished it, @MotherofPearl. There is a film of it, I discovered - I haven’t seen it, but I’ll look out for it now.

I did send away for a secondhand copy of Victoria Glendinning's biography of EB, as I was curious to learn more about her. I’m hoping she’ll explain a bit more about this novel.

I'm nearly finished reading it for the second time. I think it's a book of contradictions. They are all very busy but they don't do anything much. They have plans and good intentions, but they are stuck in the moment and have a blinkered view of the world. When Hugo talks of building a bungalow, you knew that wasn't going to happen because he is such a passive character. He would have stayed on the big house circuit forever.

I think it's very clever. I really admire it. I haven't read anything like it. I particularly liked the contrast between the lives of the people in the big house and those in the cottages or the perceived differences between the Irish, Anglo-Irish and the English. It was very witty at times. Everyone saying how Marda was going to have a wet drive (very typical) and how Laurence was an intellectual. Even their utterances were repetitive. Yes, it was sneery as well at times.

Gerald's death came out of the blue but it made sense as they were living in a state of war and the sense of menace was becoming more and more palpable as the story drew to a close. Deckchairs on the Titanic came to mind.

I wasn't too bothered by the indefinite ending. I think it was typical of a young twenty or twenty-one year old not to have it all mapped out. I took the book as a snapshot of a moment in time, a pivotal moment in Irish history seen through the eyes of a young girl. I think I will read more Bowen. I'm glad you finished it MotherofPearl. The film sounds interesting, Terpsichore. I wonder how much they deviated* *from the book.

I loathed it and gave up pretty quickly - found most of the characters and dialogue incredible at best and mostly intolerable. I had no idea what Bowen was trying to tell me at all. By page 30 I couldn’t have cared less. Next!

Gerald was only middle-class, though — his people were from Surrey and were (probably) ‘villa-ry’, whereas all Anglo-Irish people are attached to ancestral Big Houses and all know one another, apart from Hugo and Francie, who are a grim flash forward to the predicament of A-I people whose houses were burned or who sold after the war of independence/civil war. (Will the Naylors, the Trents and whatever the other family was whose houses were ‘executed’ on the same night do the same, drifting about on an eternal round of visits, or building a bungalow?)

Gerald was as unsuitable as a match for Lois, the (adoptive) daughter of an Anglo-Irish Big House as marrying Peter Connors would have been. He’s of the same (lower?-) middle-class ilk as Betty and Denise and the other British army wives who are mercilessly mocked for their vacuousness and non-U language (‘kiddies’, ‘piggy-wig’, ‘homy’).

Yes, Bowen is absolutely depicting a common Anglo-Irish condescension and snobbery towards English people, and making it clear that the supposed ancestral loyalty (after all, A-I children, like Lois and Laurence, were usually educated in England, sons certainly, at public school and Oxbridge, sons joined the British army, daughters were presented at court) is to a version of ‘Englishness’ that doesn’t exist any more.

’English’ is usually in the novel a code for behaviour unfitting for the grand, aristocratic ‘not noticing’ of the A-I, like when Francie worries they may be shot at while sitting out on the steps at dusk (not unreasonable in the middle of a guerrilla war of independence that was raging in Cork in particular), Myra says ‘You’re getting very English’.

Yes, that's true @UtopiaCookbook I agree with you. That was a fatuous comment on my part regarding Gerard. I realise he was an unsuitable match for Loïs on account of his background. I think I was annoyed with the family because they just seemed so blinkered in their views. In any case, Loïs was too young to marry anyone.

The Anglo-Irish really didn't face up to the future and acknowledge that times were changing and Ireland was changing and they chose to keep their heads in the sand until it all (quite literally) blew up around them.

I still think this is a fascinating book and I might read it again in the future.