I love books of essays, they offer a real insight into a writer's thinking and everyone including A.S.Byatt seems to see Elizabeth Bowen's writing as quite a challenge; A.S.Byatt suggesting in her introduction to The House in Paris, that Bowen learned much from Henry James and Virginia Woolf, writing 'with a harshness that is unusual and pleasing ', making this 'a very elegant and a very melodrama