One of the more baffling literary mysteries of the century is the relatively low reputation of Elizabeth Bowen. It is not enough to say, as many feminist critics do, that she is neglected because, in the words of Renee Hoogland, she "failed to meet the requirements of dominant (male) literary movements" - i.e., because she was a woman; gender never slowed the mills of the Virginia Woolf industry. In a new first chapter of this revised edition of her excellent 1981 study of the novelist, Hermione Lee sees a recent rich flowering of interest in Bowen, yet her work is still undervalued. True, not everything she wrote was a masterpiece - but of whom can the opposite be said? Novels such as The Death of the Heart and The Last September are superb works of art in the great Jamesian tributary of Modernism which was dammed - and, for some critics, damned - by Joyce on one bank and Lawrence on the other. Lee does her subject proud, pointing out that what is most extraordinary about Bowen's work is "that she applies supremely stylish and crafty fictional methods to a treatment of chaotic, unmanageable, even incommunicable experience".