Double-Crossing: Elizabeth Bowen's Ghostly Short Fiction

Starting from Bowen's ‘Anglo-Irish’ identity as a mark of the split self, I trace her literary exploration of non-belonging by looking at how her early work, above all in the short story, draws her uncannily close to the neo-gothic problematic of the ghost story. Examining her short fiction in the 1920s and 30s, I argue that Bowen's ghostly writing ultimately reaches towards an encounter with something impossible, a point of radical otherness lying beyond the legible surfaces of ‘belonging’, be they those of nation, class, identity or heterosexual legitimacy.