The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen

First published: 1964

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1950’s or early 1960’s and 1914

Locale: Somerset and London

Principal Characters:

• Dinah Dicey Piggott Delacroix, the protagonist, a well-to-do widow
• Sheila Sheikie “Beaker” Artworth, a chic matron and schoolgirl friend of Dinah
• Clare “Mumbo” Burkin-Jones, a businesswoman and a schoolgirl friend of Dinah and Sheila

The Novel

It is appropriate that a novel whose theme involves the question of dealing with the past should take place in two time frames. The first and third sections of The Little Girls are set in the period after World War II, when Dinah “Dicey” Piggott Delacroix decides to recapture her childhood; the second section is set in the time just before World War I, when she and her friends were living that childhood.

Dinah’s preoccupation with the past is evident in the first scene of the novel. Ostensibly from whim or boredom, actually from a deep need, Dinah has been collecting treasured objects from her friends with the intention of burying a sort of time capsule for the benefit of future scholars. Interestingly, she wishes to preserve the varied objects which seem essential to her friends. While she is discussing her project, Dinah suddenly recalls another cache of treasures, the coffer which she and two school friends buried when they were eleven, just before World War I. Despite the discouraging words of her suitor and neighbor, Major Frank Wilkins, who points out that one cannot go back in time, Dinah resolves to track down the school friends who shared the earlier burial and with them to find that long-forgotten box.

Like Frank, Sheila Beaker Artworth and Clare Burkin-Jones believe that a venture into the past may be dangerous. With typical zest, Dinah has advertised widely for her schoolmates, and it is primarily to stop the embarrassment caused by this publicity that Sheila and Clare agree to meet Dinah. As Clare points out, she and Sheila feel like the little pigs whose houses may be blown down at any moment. Clearly, their apprehensions are caused by more than a fear of publicity. For most adults, the present is a fragile construct whose stability depends partly on selective forgetting of the past. Fearlessly, however, Dinah persists, and the women dig up the buried coffer, which proves to be empty. Although they do reveal to one another what they had placed in the box, the schoolmates feel increasing tensions and even animosity toward one another. At the end of the novel, Dinah falls into a psychological collapse, perhaps the immediate result of a physical attack by Clare, perhaps the culmination of the schoolmates’ exploration of their common past. The moment of danger passes, however, and it is clear that Dinah will recover to commit herself to the present.

The central section of the novel is the author’s own account of the three girls’ lives during the months before England’s entry into World War I. It presents an interesting contrast to the fragmentary memories of the three adult women, as they are related in the other sections of the book, because it reveals the young girls as they were, not as they recall themselves and one another. Yet the story which Elizabeth Bowen tells is one which none of the three schoolmates will ever know, simply because it is an objective account.

Although Dinah, Sheila, and Clare will always have different perspectives on their common past, by the end of the novel Dinah has realized that reentering the past is more dangerous than she had supposed, and all the women have changed as a result of the experience.

The Characters

Describing herself, young Dicey says “I like looking for things . . . or hiding things, wondering who’ll find them. Or doing anything I can do, like getting on people’s nerves.” Called “Circe” by Clare, young Dicey or older Dinah has the urge and the capability to draw her friends into her projects, even against their better judgment. It is not surprising that Dinah conceals a gun in the coffer which the girls bury; the symbol of action and danger, it would have appealed to Dinah, an emotional daredevil. Young or old, Dinah possesses great zest for life and captivating innocence. Therefore, it is to be expected that, though a grandmother, Dinah still has the energy to organize her suitor, her houseboy, and her friends, in what she never will admit are slightly mad projects. At the end of the novel, one assumes that the wiser Dinah, waking, will still have her appealing innocence.

The schoolmates, Sheila and Clare, are similarly symbolized by what they chose to bury in the coffer. Sheila, the talented dancer who has now become a beautifully dressed, perpetually dieting wife, buries her physical flaw, the sixth toe with which she was born. Always concerned with appearances, Sheila is nervous about the publicity which may arise from the newspaper advertisements, hesitant about seeing her friends again, frightened about opening the coffer. She has suppressed the guilt she feels for abandoning her dying lover. At the end of the novel, however, she throws herself into nursing Dinah, and there is the hope that by accepting both life and herself, flaws and all, Sheila has become capable of truly living. Clare, too, must learn to participate in life. Never able to commit herself to an adult relationship, Clare, the efficient businesswoman, is still young “Mumbo,” who could not permit herself to love Dinah. When Clare buries a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry in the coffer, she is deliberately refusing passion, feeling, and life itself. When she refuses to stay with the adult Dinah, she is once again denying her own emotions. It is significant that at the end of the book Clare has returned to say a proper farewell to Dinah; though she will not let herself be enchanted by Circe, she will admit her feelings.

Critical Context

Although some critics of The Little Girls saw the work as a comedy which failed because it occasionally became serious, while other reviewers believed that in this work Elizabeth Bowen evidenced a loss of the capacity for serious or even tragic dimension which she demonstrated in The Death of the Heart (1938), later opinion has placed this novel with her others as a psychological masterpiece, as well as a book with something to say.

Like her other novels, The Little Girls is concerned with the issue of life as art. In many ways a religious writer, Bowen realized that man is limited by circumstances and by his own nature, yet he is able, within limits, to design his own life as a work of art. In order to do that, he must find his real identity, like the schoolmates in this novel, who must recover that which they buried, yet he cannot then live in the past but must decisively move into the future.

Bowen is also interested in the theme which is central to so much literature, the loss of innocence and the entrance into adulthood, a process which may seem a fortunate fall and yet which necessarily involves the discovery of evil. Finally, in The Little Girls, as in her other novels, Bowen emphasizes the quality without which life cannot truly be lived: the capacity for love. Looking at her friend, Clare understands that her life has been as empty as the box the girls dug up. “Never have I comforted you. Forgive me,” she says, and at that point, Dinah awakes, and the spell of evil is broken. Above all, Bowen emphasizes the redeeming power of love.

Bibliography

Adams, Phoebe. Review in The Atlantic Monthly. CCXIII (March, 1964), p. 187.

Austin, Allan E. Elizabeth Bowen, 1971.

Baro, Gene. Review in The New York Times Book Review. (January 12, 1964), p. 4.

Blodgett, Harriet. Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bowen’s Novels, 1975.

Hall, James. The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room: The British and American Novel Since 1930, 1968.

Kenney, Edwin J., Jr. Elizabeth Bowen, 1975.

Time. Review. LXXXIII (January 24, 1964), p. 70.