The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen
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The Last September

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Narrator: Jenn McGuirk

Unabridged: 9 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/16/2024


Synopsis

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)

About Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jaline on December 31, 2018

This novel was first published in 1929, one of the classics of literature of the time, and my first experience with Elizabeth Bowen’s writing. One of the first things I found interesting was the great care the author took in keeping the story relatively dispassionate throughout. In doing so, she refl......more

Goodreads review by Violet on June 05, 2018

Very much like To the North, this is Elizabeth Bowen finding her feet as a novelist. Once again the narrative perspective is overly fidgety, flitting from head to head. I found only three characters warranted the attention given to them - Lois, Hugo and Lady Naylor. The other characters were largely......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on November 08, 2014

So, I’m not a huge fan of Important Subject books. Books that modestly proclaim on their jackets that they are Essential Reading about a Crucial Time in history that reveal Human Truths about our Darkest Hours, or authors who set soap operas in times of great stress that come with their own built in......more