I quite liked this book, my first novel by Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen's writing style is a little odd and took me a while to get used to. There's something about the way she crafts sentences that does feel a bit stilted - I think she puts clauses and descriptors in unexpected places which makes for a different reading flow than I'm used to.

After I gave into her writing style, I really liked the story she set up. This book contrasts two young women, Cecilia and Emmeline, who end up living together after Cecilia's young husband, Henry, dies unexpectedly. Emmeline is Henry's younger sister. At first it seems that Cecilia is the lost and slightly flighty one. She is considering remarriage but can't make up her mind and seems a little distracted and unreliable all the time. Emmeline is reserved and responsible, with a job in a travel agency, beautiful and remote. But then she meets a man named Mark Linkwater and she gets into a secret relationship with him that is way over her head to manage. Everything unravels to a dramatic conclusion.

I feel like I've heard mixed reviews of this book, so I went into it with some reservations, but I really ended up liking it and am looking forward to Bowen's other books that are on my shelf. ( )

I thought Elizabeth Bowen's novel "To the North" was an okay book, but surely not good enough to merit a place on the list of 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die." I didn't get a lot out of the story-- it's the kind of book that are a dime a dozen these days, though maybe it was new and inventive in Bowen's day.

The story centers on two sisters-in-law, Cecilia, who was widowed a young age, and Emmeline, a woman with a head for business and the trials and tribulations of their love lives.

I felt both of the women were interesting characters, but the men they were surrounded by were really flat and uninteresting. The dialog seemed really stilted and there really didn't seem to be any connection between any of the characters. Perhaps that was the point. The book was okay, but nothing I'd urge someone else to read. ( )

Kind of strange- at the start, and for about half the book, I thought this was just light drawing-room comedy. Then I noticed it was getting a bit darker. Everyone felt completely alone, all while pretending to be surrounded by people they loved. Then it got a bit darker again- the main character is called 'inhuman,' and I noticed that yes, indeed, what I'd thought was whimsy could be interpreted as her being detached and emotionally non-responsive. Then it got a bit darker again, when the main character's young man is obviously seen to be an a-hole. And then the final chapter basically says: look at yourself modern world! You suck! You suck so much that you make people go crazy and drive their cars into oncoming traffic!

At the start, I thought, nice and light, three stars. The middle two quarters I thought, this is really great, five stars! The ending's so oddly tacked on - great in its own way, but so cut off from the novel - that I came back to four stars. Well worth reading, though not as good as The Heat of the Day. ( )

This is an exceptionally rarefied book - set in a small elite social circle between the wars, where everyone is tired and somehow purposeless. Travel forms a counterpoint to the focus on two young women and their relationships - starting on a train, the book ends in a car, as the dance of partnership ends. This is a book of psychological acuity rather than action - two single sisters in law, so different, are defined in relationship with men, women, their environment, and as one emerges stronger, the other falls apart. The description of internal states and the external world is exquisite and again the growth of love and romantic relationships is set against the many other ways, often comic and grotesque, in which people relate to each other. This is a book to read slowly and to savour - I will remember the girls' school, the flight to Paris, emmeline's silver dress, the back garden in st John's Wood, for a long time..

For all that the dialog throughout was so stultifyingly alien, this ended very well -- perhaps because the last pages were in narrative. The manner in which these people converse, these British, 1920s, wealthy, painfully reared and exquisitely trained people, is so layered in Received and ulterior meaning that I couldn't follow them. An engagement ring has an emerald and a relative asks whether the wearer is superstitious: this I can follow, from this I understand that in this culture an emerald is more than a pretty green thing. (Um, also I remember from Lace that Lili calls emeralds unlucky -- kill me now -- so it must be a Thing, even though it doesn't come up in Auntie Mame when Mame gives someone emeralds yet somehow manages to insult her with the gift.) But whether Dorothy liked her uncle, or whether either young woman liked their aunt-esque and how much she was supposed to resemble Lady Bracknell or Aunt Dahlia or Agatha I could not tell. They're all so languid that the suspense of the final action really surprised me.