How ‘Kent’s dramatisable coastline’ plays a significant role in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen

diana hirst

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) is not normally thought of as a Kentish writer. Born in Ireland into an Anglo-Irish family, she is generally viewed as an Anglo-Irish author. However, there is a strong argument for also seeing her as a Kentish writer. She lived in the Hythe area of Kent for two periods of her life. The first, between the impressionable ages of seven and thirteen (1906-1912), came after a traumatic period when her father became mentally unstable, and she and her mother moved from Ireland on the advice of her father’s doctors. She returned in 1965 and made her home in Hythe until her death in 1973.1 In her autobiography she wrote that ‘possibly it was England made me a novelist’, continuing:

England affected me more in a scenic way than in any other – and still does. It was the lie of the land, with that cool, clear light falling upon it, which was extraordinary. Well for me that we pitched our camp where we did! Fortunate, I mean, that ‘England’ was Kent, and, above all, Kent’s dramatisable coastline (Bowen 1975: 23-24).

Within this Kentish landscape Bowen also perceives history:

[History] burst from under the contemporary surface at every point [...]. Everyone figured, including the Ancient Romans. [...] ‘History’ inebriated me, and no wonder. Moreover, here was where it belonged: Kent-England had a proprietary hold on it. So it was this landscape, with everything it was eloquent of and comprehended, which won me (the newcomer to it) over – filling me, at the same time, with envy and the wish to partake (Bowen 1975: 25, 26).

Although she moved away from the area after her mother died in 1912, the impression Kent made on her would remain with her for the rest of her life.

These three things: the lie of the land, how light falls on it, and its history would be important elements in Bowen’s fiction. In theatrical or cinematic terms these might translate to the staging or setting, the intensity and angle of the lighting, while landscape and buildings take on active roles, becoming characters in her scenarios.

Her autobiography opens with a description of the part of Kent she was living in at the end of her life: the area around Hythe and its geological history.

[It] has wide views, though also mysterious interstices. It can be considered to have two coastlines; a past, a present – the former looks from below like a ridge of hills, but in fact is the edge of an upland plateau: originally the sea reached the foot of this (Bowen 1975: 3).

We learn much about her feelings for the impact of landscape and light and their place in her fiction from a 1950 BBC interview with the novelist Jocelyn Brooke, himself an author whose fiction is rooted in east Kent. Brooke remarks that Bowen’s novels are of:

a kind whose interest lies chiefly in a sense of place or in what’s commonly called atmosphere [...] which seem to [him] to spring from a vision of a landscape with figures, rather than from a direct interest in the figures themselves. [He tends] to remember scene and atmosphere, landscape or the interior of houses [...] much better than the characters themselves (Bowen 2010: 274).

And Bowen agrees with him, adding that ‘landscape must stand out in a certain peculiar light’. Brooke then remarks on the importance of the quality of light in her work, which she goes on to attribute to her own short-sightedness, which means that she tends to see everything ‘either as a sort of dazzling blur or in a mass of shadows’, and to the way light changes in Ireland, something she would have experienced before she even came to Kent. ‘Wherever I am, I can’t escape from almost a fatalistic susceptibility to light’ (Bowen 2010: 280-281).

Within the Kentish landscape, its architecture made an impact on the child. After her first seven years, spent in Dublin with its terraces of ‘light brown brick’ and at Bowen’s Court, the solid mansion with its ‘unemotional plainness’ standing within its demesne in County Cork, the vibrant architecture of the seaside towns, together with the history which seemed to spring from just below the surface, stimulated the child’s imagination (Bowen 1999: 467; 320).

Outwards, the uniformity of façades in Dublin (along streets terminated only by the horizon), and the inevitable likeness of one landowner’s mansion to another through the South, bespoke to me nothing but uninventiveness. I was surfeited with the classical when we sailed for England – where release, to the point of delirium awaited me. I found myself in a paradise of white balconies, ornate porches, verandahs festooned with Dorothy Perkins roses, bow windows protuberant as balloons, dream-childish attic bedrooms with tentlike ceilings, sublimated ivory-fretwork inglenooks in set with jujubes of tinted glass, built-in overmantels with flight upon flight of brackets round oval mirrors, oxidized bronze door-handles with floral motifs, archways demurely to be curtained across, being through-ways to more utilitarian or less mentionable parts of the dwelling, and so on ... (Bowen 1975: 28-29).

Not only did she set parts of her fiction in Kent, she highlighted Kentish aspects in her narratives. Thus, a character in her 1949 novel, The Heat of the Day, a native of Hythe, has ‘Jutish features’ and is a ‘Child of Kent’. (Bowen obviously knew about early Jutish settlements in Kent, and the dividing line that the Medway makes between Kentish Men to the west and Men of Kent to the east.) And in her last two novels subsidiary characters in the Kent sections have Kentish surnames, Fagg and Denge (although Denge is more commonly a place name). More importantly she wrote the Foreword to the 1952 Batsford history of The Cinque Ports.

The past of these places is of a length out of all proportion with their visible size; a particular glory has not so much departed as contracted into what for many people is little more than a legend, the rumour or ghost of a memory. [...] Indeed as the authors demonstrate, few parts of the coast of England could offer a more ideal study for the historical geographer than does this, of Sussex and Kent, with its layer upon layer of extinct, eroded or shrunken civilisations. [...] [This book cannot] fail to project pictures. The somnolent beauty of landlocked Romney; Sandwich’s steep-roofed street lit by estuarial gleams; the changing light over Hythe, with its great Marsh vista, on its forehead of hill – all these are conjured up; and not less so Dover’s strange blend of the utilitarian, military and romantic. [...] The Cinque Ports and the whole belt of coastal country in which they stand, have an endemic temperament. [...] The people – race inside the English race – have too a character bred of their unique heritage (Jessup 1952: 11-15).

Her pride in this unique heritage is evident, and she several times takes the opport-unity to stress this. Her thoughts are echoed more succinctly seventy years later by Paul Hubbard who remarks in Borderland, ‘[t]he idea of landscape as witness to history is one deeply ingrained in the folklore of the Kent coast’ (Hubbard 2022: 105).

Bowen’s fictional depictions of Kent are restricted to the coastline between Thanet to Romney Marsh, and never extend inland further than the uplands above Hythe (Map 1). Of her ten novels, five feature Kent coastal settings, as well as one short story. Two novels from the 1930s are partly set in Hythe: The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). It is in The House in Paris that the Kent landscape first becomes part of the drama. After a ten-year gap, Karen and Max have met again in London, after which Max returns to Paris. However, Max is now engaged to Naomi, the daughter of Mme Fisher, owner of the pensionnat (the ‘House’ in Paris) in Paris which Karen attended and where she and Max originally met. Nevertheless, they begin an uneasy affair. They first meet for the day in Boulogne, and decide to spend the following weekend in Hythe. Bowen opens the first of the two chapters devoted to the weekend with the words ‘Rain drifted over the Channel and west over Romney marsh; there was no horizon, the edgeless clouds hung so low’. Thus she sets the scene: damp, oppressed by the clouds, with no defining limits. After a matter-of-fact description of Hythe, the final phrase of Bowen’s opening paragraph ends on the same note that it began: the bugles at the School of Musketry are ‘muffled by low clouds’ (Bowen 1935: 148). In the next paragraph, describing Karen’s retrospect on the weekend, Bowen writes: ‘Karen cannot divide the streets from the pattern of rain and rush of rain in the gutters’. For Karen, Hythe becomes its own atmosphere, in which the streets are the rain, where the trees sigh with rain, not wind: there is no wind (Bowen 1935: 148). The rain is such that before they even arrive in Hythe they have to stop in Folkestone for Max to buy a mackintosh. In these dismal circumstances, their relationship is consummated in the Ram Hotel (based on the Swan Hotel in the High Street). The following day there is little evidence of post-coital joy or increased bonding between Max and Karen, due perhaps to ‘the desperateness of their meeting’, as that morning they walk in ‘the snug town’, made ‘an island, a ship content to go nowhere’ by ‘the stretch of forlorn marsh and sad sea-line’ (Bowen 1935: 157, emphasis added). After lunch they walk again, along the canal, where Max exclaims: ‘Karen, you made me feel this was pleasure between enemies’, to which she replies ‘There has been no time to feel anything but compulsion’ (Bowen 1935: 165). There is some brief respite towards the end of the visit when we feel that the gloom may be lifting slightly as Bowen tells us that ‘[l]ast night seemed to be undone’; there is a ‘beginning of love’. The weekend ends with what is effectively framed as a piece of cinema.

The bridge coming near, the chimneys behind it, again made a small town picture, like the view from the hill. But as they approached the bridge their figures entered the frame. Lighter even in body with happiness, Karen ran on up the slope to the road beside the parapet. She looked back and saw Max coming more slowly after her, looking back for the last time at the canal (Bowen 1935: 166).

However, this beginning of love is only momentary: while both are looking back spatially, they are also looking back on the relationship, wondering how they came to be where they are. Bowen leads us to believe that Hythe has been a ‘nowhere’ place in the sense that nothing has happened here, but as we will discover, something has happened: a son, Leopold, has been conceived. And a consequence will be Max’s suicide in the ‘House’ in Paris, following fraught conversations with Naomi and her mother shortly after his return, and before he has time to learn about Karen’s pregnancy.

Initially Hythe has a more positive atmosphere in Bowen’s next novel The Death of the Heart, though she writes: ‘A good deal of the [seaside] section has seldom been commented on except as rattling comedy. Passages in this section are as near to tragedy as I have ever come’ (Bowen 2010: 272). Portia, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is living with her step-brother Thomas and his wife Anna in their well-appointed but ‘queasy and cold’ house – in no way is it a home – in Regent’s Park in London (Bowen 1938: 170). While they go to Italy Portia is sent to stay with Anna’s former governess, Mrs Heccomb, in Seale. (Bowen has now given Hythe and Folkestone modesty veils, calling them ‘Seale-on-Sea’ and ‘Southstone’.) As Portia goes through Seale with Mrs Heccomb on the way from the station2 we begin to get a sense of the difference between London and Seale. Portia finds that the shops look ‘lively, expectant, tempting, crowded, gay’. Eventually they cross the canal bridge and ‘the sea-line [appears] between high battered rows of houses, with red bungalows dotted in the gaps’ (Bowen 1938: 131-132).

Up till now Bowen’s characters have almost always been drawn from her own social background, but Seale allows her to explore the petit bourgeoisie. Edwina Keown points to Bowen’s view of the English seaside as ‘a place of shifting identities, and [how she made it] the site of her most probing investigations of class mobility and consumerism between the wars’ (Keown 2009: 179). Jocelyn Brooke, who knew Hythe well, recognised the actual house on which Bowen had based the Heccomb house, calling it ‘[t]hat terrible house called Waikiki’ (Bowen 2010: 279). Waikiki and the ‘battered’ Esplanade may have appeared ‘terrible’ to Bowen’s pre-war bourgeois readers compared with Regent’s Park, but Waikiki has guts: ‘[c]onstructed largely of glass and blistered white paint, [it faces] the sea boldly, as though daring the elements to dash it to bits’, a fitting home for its uninhibited inhabitants, who clatter and bang about in an echo of Waikiki’s plumbing; a very different environment to that in Regent’s Park (Bowen 1938: 131-133). There is a very different quality of light to that in The House in Paris. On Portia’s first morning, light of a pure seaside quality floods in with ‘a smell of seaweed’, enticing her out onto the esplanade. The view to the east is of the imposing bluff of Southstone crowned by the most major of its major hotels – here called the Splendide but obviously based on the Metropole – while to the west there is the ‘gleaming curve’ of the marsh, with light ‘shining, shifting’, making shadows (Bowen 1938: 146-147). All seems set for a jolly good time, a time when Portia might flourish after her winter in London. But the landscape and the place themselves are about to take a hand in directing the narrative.

In London Portia has fallen in love with a mercurial young man, Eddie, and arranges for him to visit Seale. It is disastrous. The first evening the young people go to the cinema, and in the dark she catches sight of him holding hands with Mrs Heccomb’s stepdaughter. She challenges him about this the following day when they illicitly explore one of Bowen’s semi-derelict houses which, though empty, rustles with sea noises living in its chimneys and cupboards. The stairs creak, the banisters are loose. The doors are warped by sea damp, draughts make the wallpaper flutter. The rooms on the top floor are a dead end. Portia’s love for Eddie has nowhere to go: the house is an indicator for the future of their relationship (Bowen 1938: 195-201). Later they go for a walk in woods behind Hythe station; again the difficulties in the relationship are spelt out through the topography. Portia has been looking forward to her Sunday with Eddie, but ‘woods had played no part in the landscape she saw in her heart’. Portia and Eddie ‘walked inland, uphill to the woods behind the station [...] Thickets of hazel gauzed over the distances inside; boles of trees rose rounded out of the thickets into the spring air. [...] Scales from buds got caught on Portia’s hair. [...] The woods’ secretive vitality filled the crease of the valley and lapped through the trees up the bold hill’. But there the idyll ends, and the landscape begins to play its part. ‘There were tunnels, but no paths’ – they have to double up to get under the hazels (Bowen 1938: 210). Portia has to unlace twigs in front of her face and gets flies in her hair. An argument begins. Eddie gets up and begins to go round the thicket: ‘[Portia] heard the tips of hazels whipping against his coat. [Eddie] paused at the mouth of every tunnel as though each were a shut door’ (Bowen 1938: 213). The landscape has joined in the argument. But after a while things begin to resolve between the three of them: Portia, Eddie and the landscape.

Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here they could see out. The sun [...] glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze. [...] In spirit, the two of them rose to the top of life like bubbles. Eddie drew her arm through his; Portia leaned her head on his shoulder and stood in the sun by him with her eyes shut (Bowen 1938: 217).

However, the rapport between them doesn’t last. Later that day, with the Heccomb children and their friends, Portia and Eddie visit East Cliff Pavilion, a concert hall in Southstone obviously based on the Leas Cliff Hall, given its position and the proximity of the skating rink. ‘The Pavilion hung like an unlit lantern in the pinkish air [...] Dickie folded open a glass and chromium door and said the girls might like to look at the view. From the balcony they looked down at the Lower Road, at the tops of the pines and the roof of the skating rink’ (Bowen 1938: 218). Alas, not only the air is pinkish, but so is the gin! One thing leads to another and things get out of hand. Eddie behaves badly and, weeping, returns to London, leaving Portia in Hythe until her brother and sister-in-law return from Italy.

During the Second World War Bowen lived mostly in London and was an ARP warden: the war allowed her little time to focus on novel-writing and she concentrated on writing short stories and short non-fiction pieces. Among the non-fiction pieces are articles written towards the end of the War following visits to Hythe, Dover and Folkestone. The first, about a visit to Hythe in July 1943 begins with a résumé of the town’s history as a Cinque Port, and alludes to ‘the heroic end in 1940 at Dunkirk’ of the lifeboat. This is the episode in which the RNLI were asked to take the Hythe lifeboat to Dunkirk. Knowing that he was required to beach her on the sands and that she would be impossible to shift off, the coxswain of the lifeboat refused. Nevertheless, the boat was commandeered by the Royal Navy, and precisely that happened: the Viscountess Wakefield ran aground at La Panne, paradoxically the only lifeboat to be lost during the Dunkirk operation. When Bowen arrives in Hythe, despite the fact that the area was closed at the fall of France, she ‘was struck, as never before, by Hythe’s smiling air of aliveness. At no time [...] did Hythe fall into the class of those picturesque, ‘semi-dead’ towns, content to live on their past’ (Bowen 2008: 57). Rather there were birds singing loudly, and housewives were calmly going about their shopping. Hythe had ‘been extra quick to clear away bomb damage’. She recalls how as a child after church on Sundays she would see soldiers from the School of Musketry fall into rank to march back. And she praises the Mayor ‘to whose leadership Hythe at once has responded so readily and owes so much’ (Bowen 2008: 58). This warm feeling for Hythe is very different from her settings in her two novels written a decade earlier.

Her article on Dover was written just before D-Day for the Ministry of Information. After describing the pedigree of the Cinque Ports, Bowen notes the silence she meets in Dover: it is ‘charged, momentous, big with expectancy’, in other words a theatrical moment of anticipation. The past is present: ‘an unbroken past of fortifications and watchers dating back to the Romans. But the past seemed, with caught breath, to await the future’. Looking down on the harbour, beneath her she sees floating ‘invasion barges, like painted ships [...] painted canvas waiting to carry history’. Unbeknown to the reader, these are dummy craft. Bowen then gears up the tension and with it the subterfuge: British and American army lorries carry vast loads down the ‘precipitous zigzag turns of Castle hill. [...] Shaking the narrow [High Street], the armoured file of vehicles roared past. [The troops] are to embark as secretly as if they were undertaking a crime’ (Bowen 1950: 223-224). But this is a decoy piece of journalism, designed to give the impression that the invasion was being prepared to depart from Dover, and was probably part of Operation Fortitude South.3

It is the Folkestone article, written a year later, in which we find the seeds of two of her pieces of fiction: ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ (1945) and The Little Girls (1964) (Bowen 1950: 225-230). Both contrast the Folkestone – or Southstone, as she continues to call it in her fiction – of before the First World War with a later incarnation: in the closing days of the Second World War in the case of ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ and during the Cold War of the 1960s in the case of The Little Girls. She again begins by setting the ‘municipal borough, seaport and watering place’ in the context of the Cinque Ports and goes on to examine the town critically in the light of the war just finishing. At this time she says, ‘the non-indigenous rentier ‘residents’ are, for the most part, not back’ (Bowen 1950: 225). She then awards the indigenous Folkestoner with Jute characteristics: ‘generally fair, big-boned, broad-faced, armed with a clear stare, a hereditary front-line with a strong burgess tradition’ (Bowen 1950: 226). For the town, the effect of the war was, from the fall of France, the requisitioning of hotels and most houses, while the area was closed to the outside world. Ivy mats and clings to the steps of more than one private house: something she draws on for ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’. Now, ‘all-out military occupation is at an end, and Folkestone is engaged in an inch-by-inch fight back to normal’. She tells us that ‘the “old town” took the greater part of the bombing; its toy-sized high street twists steeply down to the port, between ruins of toy shops, pet shops, sweet shops, that at least one memory holds dear’. (Her love of the Old High Street, and her distress at its destruction, will feature in The Little Girls.) She ends by saying that:

It is essential for Folkestone to get going. War damage cannot account for everything; for years before this war she had been feeling the draught. From the point of view of to-day, she has disadvantages – difficulties of access to the sea, the extrusion of modern-type holiday building to miles inland. Pleasure-beach life is forced into unideal proximity with the harbour by the narrowing, as one goes west, of the strip between the Leas’ base and the sea – over which the Leas’ overhang is itself oppressive. Socially, the whole plateau set-up is out of date; there is frigid urbanity, a best-clothes compulsion. The age level of visitors to the plateau had, pre-war, been shifting up: the steadies were Midland rich middle-aged middle class – their sons and daughters wanted something more plage-y: shorts, espadrilles, the drink after the swim. For the child of 1945 Folkestone bristles with barbed wire (Bowen 1950: 230).4

This is the setting for the opening of ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ in September 1944 when the adult Gavin Doddington returns to Southstone, visiting the town for the first time since, as a child before the First World War, he would spend holidays with the widowed friend of his mother, Mrs Nicholson. The narrator describes Southstone’s general decline, dating it from 1940. Now no longer needed in Southstone, the military have all moved away and the narrator remarks that: ‘the turn of the tide of war [has given] Southstone a final air of defeat’ (Bowen 1946: 140). The story is mostly flashback, describing the life of the rentier resident on the plateau, the Leas. Both in ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ and in The Little Girls Bowen draws on her early memories, so that we see pre-First World War Folkestone and Hythe through the eyes of children: eight-year-old Gavin in ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, and Dicey, Mumbo and Sheikie who are aged ten or eleven in The Little Girls. The narrator in ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ comments that:

Southstone was, for the poor landowner’s son, the first glimpse of the enchanted existence of the rentier. [...] This society gained by smallness: it could be comprehended. People here, the company [Mrs Nicholson] kept, commanded everything they desired. [...] The expenditure of their incomes – expenditure calculated so long ago and so nicely that it could now seem artless – occupied them. What there was to show for it showed at every turn; though at no turn too much, for it was not too much. [...] Best of all, there were no poor to be seen (Bowen 1946: 146).

This is emphasised when Admiral Concannon, a friend of Mrs Nicholson, sees a stray fragment of paper and consigns it to a litter bin, bursting out: ‘I should like to know what this place is coming to – we shall have trippers next!’ (Bowen 1946: 156). Like the child Bowen, Gavin admires the architecture of Southstone: ‘[It] was ostentatious, fiddling, bulky and mixed [...] and bows, bays, balustrades, glazed-in balconies, and French-type mansardes [...] took up their part in the fairy tale’ (Bowen 146: 147). Gavin has entered a stage set and what will happen is a piece of theatre. He comes to live in a ‘fairy tale’ in which Mrs Nicholson is the Fairy Queen and he is her devoted squire. But Mrs Nicholson dies in 1912 (incidentally the same year in which Bowen’s own mother died), and the fairy tale ends. Mrs Nicholson’s splendid house, left empty during the war, is now smothered by ivy, metaphorically attempting to strangle Gavin’s memories of the earlier time. Those windows – the eyes of the house – which are not covered by ivy are sightless: ‘sheets of some dark composition [...] were sealed closely into their frames’ (Bowen 1946: 138). As ever, it is a mistake to return to the past.

On their daily walk, Gavin and the maid Rockham walk ‘zigzag down by the cliff path’ to the beach where he can play by the sea: that zigzag path still exists today (Bowen 1946: 152). While Gavin is escorted to the beach by his hostess’s maid, the Little Girls are under no such supervision and seem free to roam about Southstone. The Little Girls is in three parts with the central part being a flashback fifty years to just before the First World War. As with ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ we get a sense of life in the town at this time: Bowen has drawn on some of the memories which she recorded in her essay. ‘Before Edward VII died, many schools had obtained their hold on the plateau: crocodiles of girls in distinctive hat-bands and little boys in distinctive caps wound past one another, competing in politeness’ (Bowen 1950: 228). ‘Life has run downhill into the town proper. Here, the shopping streets, stuffy, heavily-architected, teem with Folkestoners, soldiers, and visitors’ (Bowen 1950: 229).

It is in The Little Girls that Bowen’s childhood awareness of the hidden archaeology comes to the fore: Dicey, one of the eponymous heroines, has a conversation with a school-friend’s aunt, a suffragette (who is alleged to have been chained to railings). The aunt questions her about the Roman landings nearby and suggests the girls might try to discover things the Romans left behind. But rather than going excavating themselves, the three of them decide to collect together a variety of artefacts which they bury in a coffer in their school grounds for Posterity to discover. Some of these are acquired when the Little Girls go romping along the Old High Street, visiting Mr Fagg’s goldfish shop, halfway down, in order to buy a chain which will become a fetter once in the coffer (a nod to the suffragette aunt). Among the other artefacts are a scroll in an Unknown Language invented by Mumbo (the writing is in blood, not ink!), bits of flint, a supernumerary toe once amputated from Sheikie, sparkle from an acting-box tiara. They bury this collection – what we might today call a time-capsule – in their school grounds. Soon after this, the First World War breaks out, and circumstances mean that the Little Girls are separated. But they meet up after fifty years and set out to exhume their coffer. Their old school grounds have since been built over, but – miraculously – they locate the coffer. Alas, it is empty. It has been found. Disillusionment sets in as they return to Sheikie (now Sheila)’s house for a stiff drink. In the lounge Dicey (now Dinah) at first admires and then rejects a watercolour of Southstone Old High Street hanging here. In a reflection of Bowen’s own feelings about its destruction, Dinah says: ‘It might be better to have no pictures of places which are gone. Let them go completely’ (Bowen 1946: 169). Once again, it is a mistake to return to the past.

Just after The Little Girls was published, Bowen moved back to Hythe, where she wrote her last novel, Eva Trout. Eva is a larger than life character, another of Bowen’s orphans. The story begins as she is about to become twenty-five when she will inherit her late father’s prodigious wealth. A very disrupted childhood has led to her sensing that she is not a complete being, and throughout the novel there are allusions to Eva wanting to learn to think, in order that she may become a complete being. Frustrated by her former English teacher, Iseult, into whose care her guardian, Constantine, has entrusted her, she absconds to Thanet where she rents another of Bowen’s dilapidated houses, Cathay, on the North Foreland estate, through estate agents called Denge and Donewell (the name is straight out of Dickens as is Mr Denge himself). This episode set in Broadstairs and North Foreland has faithful descriptions of the area, of Dickens’ house, a beach (either Kingsgate or Joss Bay) and of the route north from North Foreland into Thanet – passing Kingsgate Castle and the Captain Digby pub. Constantine, who tracks her down, stays at the Albion Hotel in Broadstairs. But it is the Goodwin Sands which loom ominously as a metaphor in the text and provide an undercurrent to the narrative. Having found out where Eva has bolted to, Iseult recalls that ‘[n]ear where [Eva] is on the map are the Goodwin Sands, the mariners’ peril. There’s a German poem about them, a schoolroom poem likening them to a snake’. Bowen then quotes two lines in German: ‘[S]ie schieben sich, langsam, satt und schwer, wie eine Schlange hin und her’, which translate as ‘they slither replete, heavy and slow, like a serpent, to and fro’ (Bowen 1969: 109). The two lines are the third and fourth lines of an 1847 ballad by Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), in which Fontane likens the Goodwins to a lazy, replete serpent wrecking ships and lives, sending mariners down to their graves, with the masts serving as grave-markers. Whether it is that Eva is living close to the dangerous Goodwins, or that ‘Eve’ is near the ‘serpent’ which will cause her downfall, in her almost indecent curiosity about the Goodwins, Iseult seems to be willing Eva to be wrecked. The Goodwin Sands become something of a death knell, which Bowen emphasises when Iseult herself goes to Broadstairs. Eva and Iseult meet when the latter, who is translating a French tome on Dickens, is visiting Fort House, Dickens’ house overlooking the sea, and recalls Dickens’ accounts of a wrecked cattle ship on the Goodwin Sands. ‘(Yes, the Goodwin Sands.)’, repeats the narrator, as if to say to the reader ‘Sit up and take notice!’ (Bowen 1969: 131). Later Iseult asks Eva where the Sands are, but ‘Eva did not know’: Eva is ignorant of the Sands and of the malevolence lurking nearby (Bowen 1969: 137). A second warning, less deeply emphasised but again emanating from Iseult, comes when Iseult muses on Fort House itself and concludes it is a forbidding house. ‘“Tall, solitary, [...] the house in question is a square sullen structure – hard and bleak.” One thought of it as beheld from; beheld, it was a truly Dark Tower’ (Bowen 1969: 130-131). This is a glimpse of Browning’s poem Child Roland in which the protagonist, having completed his chivalric journey, meets his end at the Dark Tower. Eva herself then sets out on an eight-year quasi-chivalric journey, during which she acquires by nefarious means a son, Jeremy, who turns out to be deaf and dumb. Through him she does meet her end. Not on Kent’s dramatisable coastline, but in Victoria Station, about to depart on the Golden Arrow for her wedding journey with Henry. Jeremy has acquired, by a melodramatic sequence of events unintentionally brought about by Iseult, the service pistol of Iseult’s husband Eric, and dances down the platform mimicking scenes from the cowboy films he and Eva used to watch. But the pistol just happens to be loaded and Jeremy shoots Eva dead. The doom threatened by the Goodwin Sands and by Fort House has come about. As Lauren Elkin notes, ‘[f]ar from being some established, irrevocable border, Bowen imagines the [Kent] coastline as vulnerable, changeable, subject to the vagaries and violence of the elements’ (Elkin 2020: 203).

What strikes the reader of these passages of fiction in which the landscape and the architecture of east Kent play such a substantial part is how they can often be destructive, and how these passages generally contain little of the exuberance and joy so evident in her descriptions in her non-fiction of her affection for the area, or in her pride in the history of the coastline, particularly in her autobiography written at the end of her life. Nowhere in her work does Bowen explain why this is: perhaps her autobiography was a form of apology. Nevertheless, it remains a paradox and there we must leave it.

acknowledgements

Extracts from Elizabeth Bowen’s works are reproduced here with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen.

references

Bowen, Elizabeth (in alphabetical order):

Bowen’s Court & Seven Winters. Introduced by Hermione Lee. Vintage Classics, 1999.

Collected Impressions. Longmans Green, 1950.

The Death of the Heart, 1938; Vintage, 1998.

Eva Trout. Cape, 1969.

The House in Paris, 1935; Penguin, 1987.

Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories, Knopf, 1946.

Listening In, Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, Allan Hepburn (ed.), Edinburgh UP, 2010.

The Little Girls, 1964; Penguin, 1982.

The Mulberry Tree, Hermione Lee (ed.), Virago, 1986.

To the North, 1932; Penguin, 1987.

People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, Allan Hepburn, (ed.), Edinburgh UP, 2008.

Pictures and Conversations: Chapters of an Autobiography, with other Collected Writings, Allen Lane, 1975.

Elkin, Lauren, 2022, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Modernist Mediation’ Cross-Channel Modern-isms, Claire Davison, Derek Ryan and Jane Goldman (eds), Edinburgh UP, pp. 199-214.

Hubbard, Paul, 2022, Borderland, Manchester UP.

Jessup, R.F and F.W., 1952, The Cinque Ports, Batsford.

Keown, Edwina, 2009, ‘The Seaside Flâneuse in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart’. Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside. Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (eds), Peter Lang Oxford, pp. 179-190.

endnotes

1 She also spent three years from 1914-1917 at Downe House School, then housed in Charles Darwin’s former home near Orpington: she recalls this time in a 1934 essay ‘The Mulberry Tree’ (Bowen 1986: 13-21).

2 Hythe’s mainline station opened in 1874 on a spur to Sandgate off the Ashford-Folkestone railway at Sandling Junction. It was sited on the steep hillside above the town requiring a stiff climb for pedestrians and was not popular therefore The spur line was closed in 1951 (though for some years Hythe’s name was retained in Sandling station’s sign which read ‘Sandling for Hythe’). Today Hythe is only served by the celebrated light railway to Dymchurch and Romney.

3 The Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France on 6 June 1944 – the start of the campaign to liberate north-western Europe – was a massive operation to land almost 133,000 soldiers in heavily defended territory. To give them the best possible chance of success, and to minimise casualties, an elaborate web of deception had been spun for almost a year previously. The aim of the deception was to reinforce the belief among those in the German high command that the main Allied landings would be in the Pas-de-Calais, across the Strait of Dover – not where they would really be, in Normandy. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dover-castle/history-and-stories/d-day-deception/

4 It would be interesting to speculate how Bowen would have viewed the nurturing of Folkestone, Hythe and Romney Marsh undertaken by the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust.

Map 1 The Kentish seaside resorts and related locations featured in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen. (Map kindly prepared by Dr Alex Kent.)