The Last September - Softcover

Bowen, Elizabeth

3.45

3,237 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099283433 ISBN 13: 9780099283430

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

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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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Product Description:

The famly at the 'big house' are in an equivocal position. Interest and tradition should make them support the British but affection ties them to the now resistant people of the surrounding country. Meanwhile, tennis parties and dances are still held, against a background of ambushes and burings. Young officers dance and flirt, or, armed, they patrol the countryside. Faint vibrations of trouble which she cannot understand reach the young girl Lois, who at the same time takes nothing for granted: hse is a child of the transition period. Time is not standing still, and no one really belives that it is. Fate is moving in the direction of this apparently immune and remote place. The young are set to be desolating free, the old desolated, by a violent act.

Review:

"Brilliant.... A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy."--The Times Literary Supplement (London)

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