Analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2025

As this last novel by Elizabeth Bowen opens, Eva Trout is deceiving people into believing that she has been engaged and has tragically lost her beloved. In fact, Eva is emotionally stunted: her mother had abandoned her infant daughter upon learning of her husband’s homosexuality, and she then died in a plane crash; her father commits suicide over the infidelity of his homosexual lover, Constantine Ormeau; and her teacher, Iseult, leaves the profession in which she excels to marry a working-class mechanic, Eric Arble.

As a boarding school student, Eva had lived with Iseult and Eric, and she adored her teacher; unfortunately, Iseult sees Eva as a reminder of the life she gave up for an unsatisfactory marriage. Eric’s virile masculinity is small compensation for his limited appreciation of the life of the mind.

Eva will inherit her father’s fortune on her 25th birthday; until then, she is the ward of the misogynistic Constantine. Unaware of her own beauty and the added attractiveness her impending wealth gives her, she invents a dead fiancée. In her emotionally handicapped state, Eva vaguely longs for acceptance and normal relationships without knowing how to go about creating either.

At the age of 24, Eva flees to a rural part of England with the assistance of 12-year-old Henry Dancey, son of the local vicar. She charges Henry to sell her Jaguar in order to provide the financial support she will need until her birthday and buys a lonely house far too large for her needs. There, in solitude, she begins to find some satisfaction and autonomy.

Soon, however, Eric Arble shows up, having learned of her whereabouts from Henry. Having failed to fulfill the ambitions he and Iseult shared to own a successful fruit farm, he has lost interest in Iseult and the marriage has soured. He tries to make advances to Eva, attracted by her beauty; Eva, however, does not have the emotional resources either to respond or to repel him.

When Constantine arrives to assuage his sense of obligation to her as guardian, she is spared further emotional distress, but her sense of autonomy is curbed.

Desiring love but fearing marriage, Eva determines to adopt a child in order to provide herself with a family. She deceives Iseult into thinking that she, Eva, is pregnant, and allows Iseult to believe that Eric is the father. The Arbles divorce as a result of Eva’s imaginary pregnancy; they blame Eva even though their marriage had already begun to fail, and both of them are alienated from her. She flees to Chicago upon receiving her inheritance, planning to use her fortune to acquire a child through an illegal adoption.

The second part of the novel picks up Eva’s story eight years later, when she returns to England with her adopted son, Jeremy Trout. She wants to reconcile herself to Iseult and Eric by telling them the truth about her imaginary pregnancy. When she inquires after them at the vicarage, she encounters Henry again. He is now 20 years old and a university student; Eva is 32. Henry observes that Jeremy is deaf and mute and feels pity for Eva.

Despite the differences between them in age and social position, Eva and Henry are drawn together emotionally. Jeremy goes to a special school in France, and with all her attention now on Henry, Eva recognizes that she is in love with him. Henry is attentive to her, even loving, but unsure of himself and troubled by the obstacles of age and fortune. He rejects Eva’s proposal of marriage, which is actually partly motivated by her desire to acquire a father for Jeremy.

Eva retrieves Jeremy from his school and asks Henry to allow her to pretend that they have married and departed for their honeymoon. The appearance of marriage, she thinks, will be enough to acquire for herself the normal status she has always desired: if other people think she has achieved marriage, and if she seems to be emotionally fulfilled, perhaps she eventually will become so. Henry agrees to the deception, but then realizes, on his way to meet her at Victoria Station for the departure on the imaginary honeymoon, that he genuinely loves her and that he can overcome his resistance to this unusual alliance.

He tells Eva his feelings, and for the first time in her life she sheds tears from the joy of finally achieving the reciprocal love she has always wanted. At that moment, however, Jeremy enters with a gun, which he acquired from Eric Arble, and which he thinks is a toy. He shoots and kills Eva at the height of her emotional development.

Although eva trout was not well liked by reviewers upon its publication, it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1970. With a narrative style that depends on elliptical conversations to create psychological realism, the novel employs techniques similar to those used by Henry James. The third-person objective point of view requires that readers infer character development and emotional problems from the contexts in which the characters are placed and from the ways they talk about themselves and their situations. Since Eva distrusts her own emotions and functions with a limited ability to understand and explain even herself, readers must compensate for her semi-silence with their own sensitivity to her problems.

Bibliography
Bennet, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. elizabeth bowen and the dissolution of the novel: still lives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Blodgett, Harriet. patterns of reality: elizabeth bowen’s novels. The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Bloom, Harold, ed. elizabeth bowen. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Hoogland, Renée C. elizabeth bowen: a reputation in writing. New York: New York University Press, 1994.