Elizabeth Bowen’s Critical “Scrap Screen”

Abstract: Elizabeth Bowen’s Collected Impressions (1950), out of print since soon after its initial appearance, has been wrongly disregarded by Bowen’s readers and critics. The volume, comprising over fifty pieces of criticism, models Bowen’s distinctive critical process—a process that is characterized by self-reflection, by deliberate and artful arrangement of her essays, and by her strategic revisionary return to a decade’s worth of her nonfiction. Archival research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin reveals that Bowen develops a “scrap screen” approach to writing criticism in an effort to make of her literary impressions something permanent. Besides re-envisioning nostalgia as part of her critical process, Bowen composes a text that serves as a unifying record of her development as a literary critic, despite her self-doubt regarding her legacy as a critic.