Elizabeth Bowen and the Anglo-Irish: Describing Women in "The Last September".

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) frames, in an implicit way, the decay of the social group known as the Ascendancy. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the feminine protagonists of this novel, but it also aims at showing by what means these women are influenced by their belonging to the Anglo-Irish identity, which constitutes a fundamental element of the tensions and agitation of the narrative. First of all, I will discuss the importance and different definitions attributed to the Ascendancy. Then, I will show that the psychological and social properties usually assigned to this social group are directly interrelated to the development of the characters, but rather than identifying all these features with every woman in The Last September, it is worth formulating and connecting these different relationships on a more abstract and open level dismissing a simplistic Anglo-Irish approach to the novel itself.