‘Oh, do let’s talk about something else-’: What Is Not Said and What Is Implicated in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen described The Last September (TLS) as ‘the only one of my novels to be set back deliberately, in a former time’.* The reader, she explained ‘must look, be conscious of looking, backward’ (Bowen 1952: 124). Bowen’s first readers did not need to look backward very far — the book was published in 1929 and set in 1920 — but the historical setting is of supreme importance. TLS is set during what, as Bowen acknowledged, became commonly known as ‘the Troubled Times’: the period leading up to the establishment in 1922 of the Irish Free State, a period that was marked by ‘roving armed conflict between the Irish Republican Army and British forces still garrisoning Ireland’ (Bowen 1952: 125). This period of transition in Irish history, and in particular the end of the era of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, is a major theme of TLS, but is rarely addressed explicitly. The characters in the novel, whose lives are increasingly affected by the fighting going on around them, generally avoid discussing the armed conflict directly and when they do discuss it, do so in vague and nonspecific terms. In TLS, what is not talked about is what is most significant.