Chapter 4 - Retroactive Judgements in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

Summary

This chapter engages with Bowen’s writings of the Second World War. It explores how these texts responded to the narratives, myths, and lies fed to Britons to maintain wartime morale and to aid the transformation, in the immediate post-war period, of traumatic and discontinuous experiences into palatable histories. The chapter begins with Bowen’s wartime autobiographical works, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942), both of which register anxieties about how personal experiences and recollections may be disputed by the assertions of historical accounts. These works are then discussed in relation to comparable concerns which emerged in the final months of the Second World War, once news of the Holocaust began to challenge both narratives which had stressed the terrible conditions endured in Britain and the scepticism many civilians had professed about reports of Nazi atrocities. Central to this argument is a reading of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949): a post-war novel that links the painful forms of retrospective censure suffered by its heroine to questions circulating in this period about personal responsibility and the limits of judgement.