The Bazaar and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

unhappy love affairs and marriages. More often than not,
Bowen trains her sights on the crisis of sundered love brought
about by an accumulation of misunderstandings, disappointments,
and betrayals. Lovers in these stories are rarely romanticised, let
alone romantic; modern love forbids the celebration of grandiose
passions in and of themselves. Lady Cuckoo comically ignores
Uncle Theodore’s marriage proposals in “Emergency in the Gothic
Wing,” which does not dissuade him from asking again. Lovers, such
as the irascible pair in “Moses” or the tetchy couple in “Flavia,” are
subjected to ironic diagnoses, either by each other or by the
narrator. Many of these stories tabulate the costs of love. An extramarital affair painfully ends a marriage in “Story Scene.” In “So Much
Depends,” the carelessness of a young woman in love contrasts with
the anguish of a mature woman unsure of how to be in love: Ellen
spreads discontent wherever she goes because she feels wronged,
whereas Miss Kerry manages her more passionate feelings without
ostentation.
    Unhappiness is one of the steepest costs of love. Accordingly,
broken engagements preoccupy Bowen. In “Comfort and Joy,” “So
Much Depends,” and “Happiness,” lovers manage their break-ups
with varying degrees of success. Some lovers call a truce to their
unhappiness; others remain permanently suspended in despair. A
broken engagement is surely in the offing in “Flowers Will Do,”
but the uncertainty of that outcome reflects Sydney and Doris’s
uncertainty about why they are engaged in the first place. As Bowen
demonstrates in her novels
To the North (1932) and The Death of the
Heart (1938), a love affair is most modern when it frays and unravels
under the force of mobile circumstances. “Flavia” proves the incom
patibility of being a wife and a lover at the same time. The story also
stakes a claim for the husband’s inability to recognise his own wife
in the guise of his epistolary lover. He wants some mystery to
occlude his knowledge of the woman he loves. Perhaps some stories
in this volume remain unfinished because Bowen did not know how
to reckon the costs of unhappiness brought about by love and its
ending.
Editorial Practices
    I first began to gather Bowen’s uncollected stories and essays with
a view to writing a critical book about her novels. J’nan M. Sellery
and William O. Harris’s
Elizabeth Bowen: A Bibliography , listing both
published and archival materials, proved indispensable for locating
obscure pieces. As thorough as Sellery and Harris’s bibliography is,
it does not record all of Bowen’s publications. By good luck and a
scrupulous reading of Bowen’s correspondence, I discovered “The
Lost Hope” in the Sunday Times. It is possible that some of the stories
included in this volume as “unpublished and unfinished” did appear
in magazines in the United Kingdom or the United States, but I
have not been able to find them. Other stories, as yet unknown, may
come to light. As I accumulated documents in order to obtain a
better-rounded sense of Bowen’s fictional output, I realised that
other scholars would probably have to retrace the process of photo -
copying and visiting archives to access these same stories. This
volume, therefore, is intended to widen the frame of understanding
of Bowen’s short stories for lay readers and scholars alike. Although
some stories in this volume were published in magazines or books,
others exist only in handwritten or typescript drafts. Published
stories automatically have a base text against which variants can be
compared, should manuscripts or drafts be extant. A manuscript for
“The Unromantic Princess,” located in the Columbia University
archives, shows few variants from the published text. The typescript
for “The Good Earl,” held at the Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin, deviates in minor details from the
published text. Unpublished stories create a