Angels and monsters: embodiment and desire in Eva Trout

‘Books continue each other’,Virginia Woolf suggests, ‘in spite of our habit of judging them separately’. Elizabeth Bowen’s final work Eva Trout (1968) is clearly a case in point in that in order to fully realize the dissident potential of this novel, it is necessary for the reader to revisit some of her earlier experiments with gender and sexuality. It is evident that the transgressive knowledge available to the writer (and reader) of Eva Trout, specifically in relation to issues of female masculinity and same-sex desire, stretches back in place and time to foundations laid in The Last September (1929).