Elizabeth Bowen Society Reading Group - Joining Charles

Join us for the next Elizabeth Bowen Society Reading Group, where we will discuss Joining Charles (1929), Bowen’s third short story collection, written during her time in Oxford and published in the same year as her acclaimed novel, The Last September. Victoria Glendinning (1977) describes Joining Charles as "a very mixed bunch," but finds the best stories to be "imaginative extrapolations of ... [Bowen's] 'young married' situation." It is a fascinating, uneven collection in which we see a now-established writer experimenting and stretching her range. 

The stories in this collection are:
Joining Charles
The Jungle
Shoes: An International Episode
The Dancing-Mistress
Aunt Tatty
Dead Mabelle
The Working Party
Foothold
The Cassowary
Telling
Mrs. Moysey

This collection of stories was first published by Constable & Co. in 1929. An edition by Jonathan Cape was published in 1952. All of these stories are available in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, with an introduction by Angus Wilson (available from Vintage (1999) & Knopf Doubleday - Anchor Edition (2006)). The stories from Joining Charles can also be found in Elizabeth Bowen: Collected Stories from Everyman's Library (2019), with an introduction by John Banville.