The Last September
by Elizabeth Bowen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth BowenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-03
ISBN: 0385720149
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Last September
Book Review: The pangs of independence
Summary: 5 Stars
One of Elizabeth Bowen's finest novels, THE LAST SEPTEMBER has grown in popularity in recent years thanks to the overtly political nature of its topic (the demise of the Anglo-Irish "county" life by means of the Irish War of Independence) and the recent 1999 film adaptation with Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw. Most of the novel's action takes place in Danielstown, the Leinster country manor of Sir Richard and Myra Naylor and their wards Lois and Laurence. At the summer season, the estate plays host to all manner of guests, including the ill-matched and unhappy Montmorencys, the highly independent Marda Nolan, and some of the local garrisoned British officers and their wives whom Lois has befriended. As they play tennis and devour raspberries, their discussion is turned primarily towards gossip and flirtation--not to the escalating violence that surrounds and dooms their isled privilege.
Like most of Bowen's earlier fiction, THE LAST SEPTEMBER is difficult reading and demands close attention: the Naylors and their set rarely say either to themselves or to one another clearly what they mean, and express themselves via euphemism, overexaggeration, understatement, and/or indirection. Only when the change of independence, either sexual or political, threatens does language become more direct and urgent: this is one of the great themes of this important modern novel. Although its outcome is tragic, the book is ultimately quite funny (as are all of Bowen's novels), and its peculiar tension between these two modes captures well the odd tensions of the cloistered and privileged world of the Anglo-Irish.
Summary of The Last September
The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching?the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.
"Brilliant.... A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy."?The Times Literary Supplement (London)
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