ИСТИНА

The Anglo-Irish modernist writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899 – 1973) is indeed peculiar in the way she uses letters in her writing. Since letter-writing was – up to the invention and expansion of the telephone – an important means of communication, there is hardly a European novel that does without any of the letters at all. Letters function variously in fiction: a letter may act as a turning-point for the plot; it may just tell about some events; add to the representation of a certain character or show certain events from a different point of view. However the way Elizabeth Bowen includes letters in her novels seem to break with tradition. From A World of Love (1955), where the old love letters are in the centre of the plot but actually never appear, to Eva Trout (1968), where the author of the love letter does not take part in the events either before or after his letter appears, the author keeps surprising her readers with the way she introduces letters into her novels.