Last September

2025 Reprint of the 1929 Edition. Centered on the doomed world of Danielstown, The Last September is a sharply perceived comedy of manners set in the time of the Irish Troubles. The ambushes and burnings of the Irish Troubles seem far removed up at the 'Great House' where they are preoccupied by the tennis-parties and dances, not to mention flirtations with English officers from the local garrison. But 'behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered' - foreshadowing the tragedy coming to its climax in the calm, opulent sunlight of an Irish autumn. The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history. In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching-the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.

"Brilliant.... A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy."-The Times Literary Supplement (London)

'Social comedy and private tragedy, it has incidental documentary value in its brilliant description of Anglo-Irish life at the troublesome time of 1920' - The Times Literary Supplement

'The descriptions of the "Great House" and its demesne linger in the memory with extraordinary persistence' - Jocelyn Brooke