الفهرس 
Chapter One: A Feminist EpistemologyOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 32 |  |  |
| | | from | 32 | | |
Abstract
Frequently Elizabeth Bowen has been viewed as E.D. Pendry viewed her in 1956, as the most feminine of contemporary novelists,
-primarily because she does not stray far outside the confines of the lower
nobility and upper middle-classes; because she is interested in men and women as private individuals in everyday life; because she is intuitive in personal issues, sensitive in a high degree to the difficulties of ordinary experience, and attentive to the despairs and ecstasies which other people may not feel, or having felt, ignore (120-123). The title of Pendry’s book, The New Feminism of English Fiction, is misleading where Bowen is concerned, for he does not treat her as a new feminist in today’s use of the term, but as a typically female writer who falls into the stereotype usually assigned by male critics to female writers. Women’s books are, in this kind of thinking, necessarily confined, limited books of particular insular or provincial concerns since women are thought to write from feeling and intuition, while men write from reason and knowledge (Ellmann 158). Women writers are all too often relegated to certain feminine modes because of their supposed appeal to the female sex only.
Orville Prescott has called Bowen a coterie writer who uses her genuine talents to write novels of strictly limited appeal (52). What he finds lacking in Bowen’s novels is the male appeal. He categorizes her with writers who do not typify aggression and vitality, which does not support the notion of machismo. According to sexist criticism ”range is masculine and confinement is feminine.”(Ellman 87). Thus she is considered a limited writer because she does not concern herself with those subjects and attitudes that specifically concern the male writer.
Fredrick Karl believes that the likelihood of having a hero, or performing heroic acts, is something that is not present in Bowen’s novels. He claims that in spite of the fact that she is interested in good and evil that her statement is mute and this is the difference between a man’s vision of the world and a woman’s which is more immediately personal and closer to the facts of daily reality. He feels that life for Bowen is trivial and frustrating.