Elizabeth Bowen and the Futurist Imagination

Although Elizabeth Bowen always rejected Futurism's links to fascism, Futurist aesthetics were an important influence on her fiction. In her 1932 novel To the North, she lampooned and condemned British fascism's borrowed Italian aesthetics, but in 1935's The House in Paris, Bowen took up some of the techniques of the Futurist painters, adapting them in order to draw attention to the situation of fascism's potential victims. What changed from one novel to the next was the tone and urgency of her critique, and the focus of her Futurist inquiry, which switched from Marinetti/Mussolini's “speed” trajectory to the “noctambulist” temporal and spatial experiments of Futurist painters.