Although not of the same era, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart brings to mind the work of Jane Austen. This literary masterpiece, written in the Modern Period (during or immediately after World War I), centers around an adolescent girl's "coming of age" in an era of many questions and precious few answers. The brilliance of this novel is the linking of the familiar novel format to a Virginia Woolf-like stream of conciousness style of writing. I've recommended this book to many a bibliophile and never have had it fail to make an impact on the reader

Bowen is quite plainly superb in her observation of her characters and their surroundings, noting with precision tiny gestures and details that cut straight to the heart. Her description of Portia 'hanging her head like a cat in a bag waiting to drown' (I paraphrase as I do not have the book in front of me) says everything (and is uncannyly similar to a Verve lyric in Bitter Sweet Syphony! .. so be it). Read this book. Read it carefully.

The reviewers who have come before me have variously praised this fine book, and called Elizabeth Bowen a sadist. Quite so. This book has the suicidal weariness of Brideshead Revisited, and a protagonist that you'd like to shake some sense into, a la Of Human Bondage. That said, both the prose and the dialogue are pure pleasure to read. If you find this book a downer, cleanse your palate with I Capture The Castle, the flip side of this story.

I have read D.H. Lawrence, Henry James and E.M. Forster and understood their characters' motivations and personalities. This book had whole paragraphs that were so convuluted I could not follow them. I liked the descriptions of the peripheral characters and understood them. Overall the book was boring. "Room with a View" is far superior -- romantic, lovely and touching. This is my second Bowen and I don't plan to try another.

Not the greatest novel in the world, but a good introduction if you would like to read Bowen. The lack of any real resolution to the plot is kind of disheartening and leaves the reader with a feeling of nothing being accomplished. Bowen writes about subtle emotions well, but throws out too many at the reader at once. The novel seems more of an intellectual excercise in form rather than a real literary accomplishment.

The novel's storyline is fairly divided among several well-to-do British guests staying at a hotel on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s--mostly concerned with the subtle nuances of their emotional interactions with one another, the narrative eventually comes to settle on the neurotic Sydney (a young travelling companion to an invalid cousin) who has become overly attached to the beautiful and manipulative Mrs. Kerr.

Though is far from Bowen's best, this is a wonderful read for anyone who has enjoyed the many novels of this period cocerning genteel Englishmen abroad--Forster's ROOM WITH A VIEW, von Arnim's THE ENCHANTED APRIL, and Woolf's THE VOYAGE OUT. The style is deceptive: you can get much more out of this on a second read than the first time round.

John Halperin takes Lytton Strachey as his model and provides four short lives of people he views as emblematic of the "second Georgian" era - King Geroge V himself, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby and Nancy Astor. The results are interesting without being particularly memorable. Halperin tells his stories in a plain documentary fashion, without much analysis and with none of the mordant wit or strong opinions of Strachey's nasty little classic. Such a straightforward approach works best if bolsered by extensive research, but the slim bibliography indicates a newspaper profile rather than an original and insightful work. All this being said, Bowen, Philby and Astor are interesting enough as people to making reading "Eminent Georgians" worthwhile. As for the good King George, it will take a much more persuasive writer to bring that admirable but dull monarch to life on the page.