Product Description

A picture of Anglo-Irish life at the troublesome time of 1920. The family at the "big house" are in an equivocal position. Interest and tradition should make them support the British but affection ties them to the now-resistant people of the surrounding country.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91924 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 206 pages

Review
A republication, with a new preface, of Elizabeth Bowen's second novel which appeared originally in 1929. This, more than any of her works, has a "deep, clouded spontaneous source" in her own youth in Ireland during the "troubled times" when guerilla guns reverberated against a formal tradition which has its direct reflection here. For it is the succession of tennis parties and dances, teas and visits which frames and stirs the life within Danielstown, the home of the Naylors, imperiously and at times imperviously Anglo-Irish aristocrats whose social snobberies extend as well to the British officers garrisoned there. Among them is Gerald, who falls in love with their niece Lois, Lois who is impressionably and wishfully romantic, anxious to match the absolutism of Gerald's love. And that "lovely, too mortal month" comes to its close with Gerald's death, and the burning of the house which is to free Lois for the future of which she is still so unsure, while for the Naylore there is only the desolate destruction of a world which is both substance and symbol... The narrative here is fragmentary- to a point of fraility: but there is once again the matchless pervasiveness of place and time as it touches off a private world of expectant emotion and intimation. (Kirkus Reviews)