Saturday, December 22, 2018

THE LITTLE GIRLS




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The Little Girls, Elizabeth Bowen, Alfred A Knopf, 1964, 307 pp
 
 
I don't think people read Elizabeth Bowen much anymore, except for a few of my friends on Goodreads. She began publishing novels in the 1930s, a bit prior to where My Big Fat Reading Project begins at 1940. I have read three of her novels now. I began with The Heat of the Day, found in a used bookstore in Ireland in 2005. Then I read her atmospheric A World of Love, set in a crumbling Irish manor house. 
 
The Little Girls was published in 1964, the year I am currently, though slowly, reading. As in the two others I have read, I had to slow down and adjust to her sentences. Not many authors these days write sentences which require the reader to pay attention. I fear that a deadly combination of MFA programs, bestsellers that take no more effort than watching TV, and lowering literacy rates (I know, I am a snob) have put us out of the habit of following such sentences. However, in the way that a soft spoken person draws you closer, so does she pull you in towards her carefully developed characters.

Three British women who were friends in school just before the outbreak of WWI are brought back together by the eccentric Dinah in the early 1960s. Their reunion is fraught with all their old rivalries and escapades. The novel moves between those two time periods, a commonplace in many of today's novels though it has been done before and in this case both are equally compelling.

It took many pages for me to identify the three characters because Bowen is (deliberately?) vague as to who is speaking and each one has a nickname as well as a new last name in the present time. Again, she was requiring me to pay attention and pulling me in, page by page, as to how and why those three little girls got up to such pranks and why that might affect them later.

By the end, I felt I had known these women for years. I loved the way she showed that we don't change much, that our embryonic personalities in childhood stay with us as we mature, though with age comes an ability to better understand those we have known since those early years.

16 comments:

  1. I haven't read anything by Elizabeth Bowen yet, but she's an author I'm interested in reading - maybe in 2019.

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    1. When she wrote about WWI it is so real because she lived through it.

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  2. Elizabeth Bowen is not a name I'm familiar with, but it sounds as though she is a writer worth knowing.

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  3. Great review!

    I agree with you, some books are so easy to read that they do take about as much effort as watching TV, I've come to call them mindless books, because I can still gather the plot after zoning out with my eyes still reading.

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    1. Thank you, Carrie. I love that image of you still gathering the plot after zoning out with your eyes still reading! Sometimes such books are just what I need.

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  4. Judy, I've never read this author but, feel like I should. Thanks for sharing and enlightening me. Merry Christmas; hope it's special.

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    1. Happy to share! Merry Christmas to you. We will make it special. We'll be making beef bourguignon from a modified Julia Child recipe. Husband is cooking, I am sous chef-:)

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  5. It's true that most books nowadays hardly required to pay attention, and the ones that do, are snubbed. Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to you and yours, Judy! I'm blessed to count you among my blogger friends.

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    1. Alas-:( Thank you for the holiday wishes. I too feel blessed and thankful for our blogger relationship. Let's have a great New Year!

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  6. I haver never read Bowen but she sounds good. I tend to like writers who put a little effort into their prose. The plot and characters of this one also sound interesting. It is so neat that no matter how obscure a writer is, fans can connect on platforms like Goodreads.

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    1. She was given honors by the Queen, I know that! I also love Goodreads for the same reason, as well as book blogs.

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  7. It's a shame the older writers get overlooked. Merry Christmas from Carole's Chatter

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    1. I agree completely! Hope you had a Merry Christmas too!

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  8. This book sounds like a delightful read! The last paragraph you wrote about this novel was my favorite!

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    1. Oh good. I am glad you liked that.

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