The Bazaar and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

keyboard – she was not a fast typist
     
– or, less often, not having revised. I have silently corrected obvious
spelling errors. French gave Bowen minor problems. As she recounts
in the essay “The Idea of France,” she glimpsed the mauve contours
of the French coast across the English Channel when she was a child
and yearned to go there. Go there she did. With her husband, Alan
Cameron, Bowen visited out-of-the-way destinations in France in
the 1920s and 1930s, and she resumed her romance with the
country after the war. To improve her French, she translated sections
of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Flaubert’s L’Éducation
sentimentale into English, as documents in the Harry Ransom Center
prove (HRC 9.7–9). A long quotation – so long as to be show-offy
     
– from Stendhal’s De l’Amour appears in To the North . Despite im
mersion in the French language, Bowen consistently makes errors
with accents. Perhaps under the influence of Italian, she does not
hear the phonetic difference between an accent grave and an accent
aigu . She has an unaccountable preference for the grave , so that, for
example, necessité becomes necessitè and négligée turns into negligèe .
    As far as possible, editorial emendations have been kept to a
minimum. Where variants reveal something about the text, I have
recorded them. Because these stories were written over four decades,
from approximately 1920 to 1960, spelling and hyphenation
change. Early stories show a preference for keeping “for ever” as two
words, whereas “forever” becomes the norm in later stories. Bowen
also makes distinctions between “on to” and “onto,” with the latter
preferred in phrases concerning contact with a surface. Both “on to”
and “onto” appear in the opening paragraph of “Happiness” to
indicate distinct prepositional properties. Some of these stories,
having appeared in the United States, adopt American spellings,
which I alter to standard British spellings for consistency. On the
other hand, neologisms, such as “multitudinies” in “Moses,” stand on
their own, without alteration or gloss; such invented words are part
of Bowen’s resourcefulness, which never ceases to surprise for its
aptness and its freshness.
    Capitalisation has been regularised, as has the spelling of certain
recurring words (“earring” and “drawing-room”). In fact, the hyphen -
ation practices of the 1920s and 1930s tell a story about the
evolution of compound words in the English language. Some
hyphenated words have been preserved because they attest to the
decades in which the stories were written: “tip-toe” and “trap-door.”
Other hyphenations have been regularised to contemporary usage:
“to-day,” “to-morrow,” and “week-end” lose no significance when
spelled “today,” “tomorrow,” and “weekend.” Over the years, hyphen -
ated compounds tend to lose their hyphens. Whereas “drawingroom” usually appears with a hyphen in stories from the 1920s and
1930s, later compound nouns dealing with rooms seldom have
hyphens: “schoolroom,” “classroom,” “diningroom,” “livingroom.”
And, by the same token, the disappearance of the drawing-room
from postwar households causes the word to retain its hyphen as a
vestige of another era.
    Although this volume aspires to create a fuller sense of Bowen’s
short story
œuvre , not all unpublished fragments have been included.
After deliberation, I decided to exclude seven story fragments that
are housed at the Harry Ransom Center. In their unfinished state,
these sketches seldom exceed a few pages in length and are uneven
in quality. “Amy Ticer” and “Ellen Nevin” are short character
sketches (HRC 1.1). “A Thing of the Past” concerns celebrity (HRC
9.1). Although Sellery and Harris claim that the fragmentary “A
Thing of the Past” is a sketch for “The Last Bus” (234), the two
stories – one set on a hot summer day near the sea and