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A new Ireland is announced: the Free State

and the end of an era


Elizabeth Bowen’s second novel
The Last September (1929)
• Set in Ireland from September, 1920 to February, 1921. Effectively describes the
life of an Irish Big House, Danielstown, County Cork, immediately prior to its
destruction in the war of Independence (1919-1921).
• Irish history and Gothic literary tradition (W.J. McCormack describes Bowen as a
Gothic writer in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991, p.853)
• The Anglo Irish Ascendancy and the country houses as a symbol of its power.
• The crumbling of the Big House parallels the crumbling of the Anglo Irish as an
aristocratic class:

“The high windows were curtainless [...] exhausted by Sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin light
orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the floor by the glare of morning still hung like dust on
the evening chill” (p.9-10)
• Characters are portrayed as Anglo Irish landowners who tried to
maintain their accustomed behaviour patterns in the midst of a
threatening political situation. They do not take sides about politics,
but comment on the acts of violence and restriction around them.
• They see themselves as different from the English but also apart from
the local Irish cottagers and Catholics. They attempt to be friendly
with both sides. The girls all dance with the British soldiers and worry
over being seen as too Irish (and old fashioned) or maybe not Irish
(and charming) enough and wonder what being Irish means at all,
especially in the eyes of the English.
• Generation gap between those born in the 19th century and those in
the 20th mingling with the Irish tensions:
“Driving home… Lady Naylor told them of a discovery she had made. Mrs. Carey, also, did not understand modern young
people. They seemed, Mrs. Carey had said, to have no idealism, no sense of adventure, they thought so much of their own
comfort… since the War they had never ceased mouching. She herself had had a deep sense of poetry; she remembered going
to sleep with Shelley under her pillow”. (p. xx)

• Young people in the house considered ‘modern’ (Lois, Lawrence)


• Lois Farquar, a young girl, trying to find her place in the world and a
‘new nation’ trying to establish its new identity.
• The Big House representing Irish politics and colonial relations. Its
burning at the end of the novel allegorically attests the end of Anglo
Irish community and culture in Ireland.

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