Gothic continuities in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Happy Autumn Fields and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are passages in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Happy Autumn Fields that do not read like twentieth-century fiction. They seem to belong to an earlier time—half-sketched in candlelight, folded into creased letters, glimpsed through falling leaves at the edge of a dream. In these pages, Bowen—most often read as a modernist of wartime dislocation and psychological nuance—returns, with striking naturalness, to the tonality of the high Gothic. Yet this return is not ironic or pastiche. Rather, it is a quiet act of literary recursion, an echo that resounds back to the long sentences and interior shadows of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a text equally suspended between the romantic and the nightmarish, where female intimacy becomes both sanctuary and haunting.
In both stories, the world is presented through a veil—light diffused, meaning partial, time softened. When Bowen writes, “Somewhere in the English countryside it was autumn: the trees were golden, the air thrilled with a silvery light,” she is not merely describing a season but establishing a mood of unreal suspension, where time itself, like the identities of the characters, becomes porous. It is not far from this to Le Fanu’s opening vista, in which “a melancholy wave swept over the hills, and the shadows of the beech trees stretched across the road like the bars of a cage.” In both, landscape is not backdrop but medium of emotion, a gothic interface through which the unspoken or unspeakable seeps.
This essay argues that The Happy Autumn Fields is a modern Gothic tale in deep aesthetic continuity with Carmilla—not just in theme or mood, but in its very language. It draws on the tradition of the English ghost story not to frighten, but to uncover. Through lyrical prose and mirrored relationships, Bowen revives the latent queerness, the soft dread, and the silken binding of feminine souls that haunted Le Fanu’s novella. Sarah and Henrietta—like Laura and Carmilla—exist in a sealed world of affection, threatened by the intrusion of men, and their closeness is not merely psychological or symbolic but suffused with affective intensity. In both tales, intimacy is reverent, possessive, and unmoored from social time. The past, once disturbed, returns—not with vengeance, but with yearning.
By comparing specific descriptions, narrative movements, and stylistic cadences, this essay will trace how Bowen inherits and transforms the gothic tradition of Le Fanu. In doing so, it will show that The Happy Autumn Fields is not just a story of wartime displacement, but a quiet resurrection of a lost literary mode—a mode in which women speak through silence, love haunts the visible world, and prose itself becomes a spectral field.

Atmospheric Echoes: Landscape as Mood, Mirror, and Spell

In The Happy Autumn Fields, Elizabeth Bowen opens her narrative with a description so crystalline and delicate it resists not only chronology, but solidity. “Somewhere in the English countryside it was autumn: the trees were golden, the air thrilled with a silvery light.” Already, the reader is transported not into a location but into a mood—a kind of suspended, luminous present that feels more dreamed than remembered. The landscape is not inert backdrop; it is mood incarnate, a medium for the characters’ inward states and the story’s liminal logic. The phrase “the air thrilled” is crucial: Bowen's prose is charged not with motion but with vibration, a sense that the world is humming with something just beyond apprehension. This trembling atmosphere prepares the reader for a narrative governed not by action but by seepage: the past seeps into the present, the real into the unreal, childhood into womanhood, and affection into loss.
This tonal and stylistic gesture is profoundly Gothic, not in its tropes but in its texture. It echoes almost precisely the opening movement of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, where Laura describes the Styrian countryside in terms of melancholic beauty and spectral calm: “It was evening when we arrived at the schloss, and the scene was melancholy. The woods drew closer around us, and the shadow of the trees fell like bars across the road.” Here too, the landscape is charged—not with life, but with the visible presence of stillness, enclosure, and things unspoken. The “bars” of shadow across the road are emblematic of how, in both works, the natural world becomes a threshold—a porous membrane between inner and outer states, between past and present, between the seen and the felt.
Both Bowen and Le Fanu wield landscape as a psychological mirror—but more than that, as an emotional trap. In The Happy Autumn Fields, the autumn countryside does not merely evoke nostalgia; it arrests time. It holds the characters—and by extension, the reader—within a sealed atmosphere of golden decay, a moment where change is eternally deferred. The light is soft, the edges are blurred, and the future feels indefinitely postponed. So too in Carmilla, where time moves strangely, and the castle seems always to exist at twilight, as if the sun were too shy to rise or set. These settings are not idyllic—they are anaesthetized, flattened into beauty that suffocates even as it seduces.
Importantly, both stories use this atmosphere to create protection for a relationship that cannot be openly acknowledged. In Carmilla, the castle and its surroundings provide the space for Laura and Carmilla’s daily entwinement, their half-innocent, half-dangerous fusion. In The Happy Autumn Fields, the glowing countryside shelters Sarah and Henrietta’s bond—childlike on the surface, but intensified by exclusion and emotional secrecy. In both cases, the landscape becomes complicit, a participant in the spell that preserves their togetherness. The natural world doesn’t simply reflect their state of being; it colludes in it.
Thus, the opening atmospheric gestures of both works establish more than tone—they structure the psychic and symbolic stakes of the stories. Where modernity demands progress and revelation, these Gothic landscapes demand reverie and refusal. They allow their characters to linger—in childhood, in closeness, in emotional secrecy. And when that spell is broken, as it inevitably is, it is not merely a narrative shift but a wound in the very grammar of the story. Something ruptures—something irrevocable.

Queer Affection, Female Intimacy, and the Closed World

At the emotional core of both The Happy Autumn Fields and Carmilla lies a feminine bond so totalizing that it becomes indistinguishable from identity itself. These are not friendships, nor even romances in the conventional sense; they are affective enclosures, sealed worlds in which one girl’s sense of being is formed, reflected, and protected entirely within the presence of another. In Bowen’s story, the relationship between Sarah and Henrietta is framed as sisterly, but the intimacy of their connection carries an emotional exclusivity that transcends the ordinary registers of familial closeness. Their movements are synchronized, their private jokes unspoken, their bodily closeness habitual and unrehearsed. Their conversations exist in a register apart from the rest of the household: instinctive, elliptical, and absolute in their mutual understanding.
This exclusivity is not left implicit. At one point, a character suggests that Sarah had been seen out alone. Henrietta’s reaction is immediate and vehement: "Sarah was never alone!" She does not correct the speaker gently, nor entertain the possibility with amusement. She denies it ontologically—not just that Sarah would not have gone out alone, but that such a condition could not exist. In this exclamation, Henrietta voices not only her possessiveness but the deep interdependence that structures their world: the self cannot exist apart from the beloved. To imagine Sarah without Henrietta is to imagine a fundamental error in the order of things.
This structure of attachment—exclusive, enveloping, and resistant to intrusion—finds a clear analogue in Carmilla, where Laura and the eponymous vampire form a similarly sealed emotional dyad. Carmilla’s attentions to Laura are unmistakably erotic: “Her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses,” Laura recalls, “and she would whisper to me, with trembling lips, and cling to me as if she feared that I should die.” Laura is overwhelmed by these advances—sometimes flattered, sometimes disturbed, but always absorbed. She never quite names what is happening between them, but she cannot look away. Her language is suffused with the same tonal ambiguity that shapes Bowen’s descriptions: awe, fear, tenderness, enchantment. Carmilla, like Henrietta, demands not affection but total attention. Any possibility of outside connection is met with wounded withdrawal or jealous interruption.
And just as Henrietta resists the suggestion of Sarah being seen alone, Carmilla reacts fiercely to Laura’s divided loyalties. She becomes withdrawn, her eyes filling with tears, her manner shadowed by what the text describes as “a temper of gloom and resentment.” When Laura describes Carmilla’s moodiness, it is not the petulance of a friend, but the possessiveness of a lover, a presence who cannot abide not being the sole recipient of devotion. In both stories, the emotional logic is the same: love must be total, or the structure of the relationship collapses.
Eugene, the would-be suitor in Bowen’s story, represents exactly this threat of collapse. His interest in Sarah—gentle, polite, and unobtrusive though it may be—is received by Sarah not with embarrassment or confusion, but with palpable distress. Her body recoils from him; her thoughts fracture. The narrative itself begins to break under the weight of his presence, as if the story cannot continue while he remains on its periphery. His courtship is not simply unwelcome—it is a destabilizing force, an attempt to impose adult heterosexual logic on a world that has been sustained by emotional secrecy and suspended time. Sarah’s resistance to Eugene is not a matter of preference; it is an act of ontological preservation, an instinct to protect the sanctity of her bond with Henrietta from the entropy of heterosexual futurity.
This dynamic is again echoed in Carmilla, where the presence of male authority figures—Laura’s father, the doctor, the Baron—gradually dismantles the quiet, enveloping spell of Carmilla’s presence. These men arrive bearing the logic of explanation, rationalism, and elimination. They do not understand Carmilla; they dissect her. What they destroy is not only a vampire, but a relationship outside the limits of what can be named. Laura survives, but she is diminished—left with a memory that is more a wound than a tale, a loss that remains unresolved and unknowable.
Both stories offer a vision of love that is hidden, pre-verbal, and utterly sincere—and both mark its destruction not as liberation, but as catastrophe. Sarah, by the story’s end, is fractured between timelines, her consciousness unable to maintain coherence. Laura, older and narrating retrospectively, still speaks in the passive tones of someone haunted by a memory she never fully possessed. Neither woman is offered closure. What they shared with their counterpart—Henrietta or Carmilla—is not framed as temptation or sin, but as something too rare and total to survive in a world governed by reproductive time and patriarchal intrusion.
And so both Bowen and Le Fanu leave us with a memory of tenderness under glass: a preserved intimacy we were allowed to witness only for a moment, before the spell broke, and the light changed.

The Shield of Timelessness

The use of a 19th-century setting in The Happy Autumn Fields is not incidental. It is a narrative strategy, yes—but more than that, it is a temporal shelter, a protective fold in time that allows Bowen to stage a form of intimacy that feels increasingly impossible in her own war-ravaged present. Sarah’s consciousness, fractured by the pressures of modern life and wartime duty, retreats not just into memory but into a linguistic and atmospheric past, one rendered in prose that itself resists forward movement. The sentences slow, deepen, circle back. They hover. And in that hovering, a kind of feminine timelessness is preserved.
This is not simply nostalgia for a vanished England. Bowen is doing something stranger, more subversive. She uses a style drawn from 19th-century Gothic fiction—rhythmic, pictorial, emotionally saturated—to suspend her characters in a state of unconsummated intimacy, particularly between Sarah and Henrietta. Within this enclosure, time does not pass in the ordinary sense. There are no clocks. There are no declarations of love, no plot-driven separations or reconciliations. Instead, there is pure duration: days of golden fields, shared walks, mirrored glances. The girls are not growing up. They are not moving forward. They are circling—and in their circling, they preserve something pre-sexual, pre-social, pre-historical.
This aesthetic of suspension finds its counterpart in Carmilla, where Le Fanu’s prose elongates perception and emotional response. The world of the castle is barely touched by seasons; the characters drift through long afternoons, repeated dreams, languid conversations. The eroticism between Laura and Carmilla is intensified not by physical climax but by prolonged proximity, the unbearable sweetness of love that does not declare itself. “Years passed in that silent, happy, mysterious world,” Laura recalls—but in fact, barely any time passes at all. That “years” is emotional, not chronological. It is the sense of eternal afternoon, an atmosphere so fragile that time itself dares not intrude.
In both stories, then, timelessness is not just a theme—it is a structural defense, a kind of aesthetic magic that shields love from the violences of heterosexual adulthood, reproductive obligation, and historical rupture. What breaks this timelessness is never internal exhaustion but always external intrusion: the suitor, the war, the vampire hunters. Time—and the adult world it enforces—arrives as a destroyer.
In this sense, Bowen’s adoption of Gothic style is not ornamental or ironic. It is protective. She uses the slower, reverent cadence of Le Fanu’s prose to recreate not just a past setting, but a past possibility—the emotional ecology of girlhood before it is broken open by duty, desire, and history. Her sentences hold back the march of plot the way Sarah and Henrietta hold back the approach of Eugene. To let the story accelerate would be to let the world win.
Thus, timelessness in these works is a gesture of refusal—refusal of chronology, of closure, of the maturation that leads not to fullness but to fracture. To linger in the golden fields or the shadowed castle is to believe, however briefly, that there is a space for love without loss.

The Splitting of the Fields

The golden light of the countryside in The Happy Autumn Fields does more than evoke nostalgia—it builds a perimeter. It creates a temporal sanctuary in which Sarah and Henrietta’s bond can remain untouched by the directional pull of history, sexuality, or adulthood. Their shared world resists sequence. It is not linear, but cyclical—a slow rhythm of gestures, glances, and walks that seem always to repeat, as if outside the jurisdiction of change. Within this space, they imagine escape not into adventure, but into irrelevance: a meandering errand to visit an old man who "won't remember them." This is the heart of their fantasy—not discovery, not visibility, but the safety of being forgotten. To exist without consequence, without inscription in the narrative of becoming a woman, is the deepest wish of the story.

But the field cannot remain sealed forever. Bowen introduces a rupture with quiet violence: the arrival of boys on horseback. The imagery is startling in its symbolism—forward motion, speed, force, mounted height. The boys do not simply arrive; they intrude. One of them, in his haste and obliviousness, knocks a girl over. The moment is quick, but its weight is enormous. The intrusion of male energy into the dreamlike, circular world of the girls is not just clumsy—it is mythic. It enacts the fall. Time reasserts itself, its forward thrust embodied in the horses’ hooves, the physical stumble, the division of the girls.

This is not only the end of the dream. It is the end of the possibility of remaining in that dream without violence. Sarah is thrown toward adulthood, not by choice but by interruption. The horseback riders are not malicious, but they are emblematic: they carry with them the unspoken demands of society, reproduction, marriage—the whole trajectory that Henrietta and Sarah’s bond had quietly defied. The scene’s power lies in how bodily it is, how unromantic. The fracture is not metaphorical. It is felt in the limbs.

This moment recalls with eerie precision the sequence in Carmilla when Laura is interrupted mid-thought by the entrance of male authority. Up to that point, her relationship with Carmilla is ambiguous, cloistered, shrouded in repetition. They speak in half-truths, move in half-light. But as the danger becomes visible—sickness, dreams, blood—the world begins to narrow. The doctor arrives. Then Carmilla’s true identity is exposed by the male genealogist, Baron Vordenburg. The idyll collapses under the weight of knowledge and history. The men dissect what they do not belong to, and in doing so, dissolve it.

There is an emotional parallel here to the horseback intrusion in Bowen’s story. In both, the feminine world is not destroyed by betrayal from within, but by the pressure of outside structures. These are not jealous lovers or rival friends, but messengers of a reality that no longer tolerates ambiguity. In The Happy Autumn Fields, Sarah’s psychological split—her simultaneous presence in the dream-world and in wartime London—is catalyzed by this moment. It is the first visible sign that her world will not hold.

In this light, the horsemen are not just boys. They are emissaries of what Lee Edelman calls "reproductive futurism"—the cultural demand that one grow up, move forward, become legible, and contribute to the machinery of life that includes marriage, war, and legacy. Henrietta and Sarah’s bond has no place in that future. It is too suspended, too self-contained, too devoted to the present. When the boys arrive, they do not just separate the girls physically. They introduce the idea that this closeness will not last. That time, and society, will have their say.

This same inevitability haunts Laura’s final remembrance of Carmilla. Though she has survived, she does not sound whole. She speaks of Carmilla as a wound, a lingering sadness, a memory that has been sanitized by explanation but not healed. The adult world claims to have solved the mystery of Carmilla, but it has not touched the intimacy that preceded it. That intimacy is now unreachable—not because it has decayed, but because it has been violently reclassified. It cannot be returned to.

So too with Sarah. Her return to the war-torn present is not a process of growth, but a splintering. The girl in the fields and the woman in the darkened London flat are not continuous selves, but separate realities. The fracture was not a moment of maturation, but of exile. The light has changed. The field is gone.

Memory, Desire, and the Haunted Present

The war that frames The Happy Autumn Fields is not just a setting—it is a metaphysical force. It forms the hard perimeter of Sarah’s present, where ration books and bomb warnings delimit the day and time itself is rationed, flattened, rationed again. The fields are gone. The golden air has curdled. We are given only fragments: a narrator who cannot concentrate, a body resting in near-darkness, a radio muttering inconsequential updates like a priest who's lost his sermon. In this London room, Sarah is not so much living as being kept. Her wartime reality is dim, dull, and yet laced with panic. What she escapes into—the countryside, the dream of Henrietta—is not simply memory. It is a zone of meaning. And now that zone is under siege.

If the pastoral sequences in Bowen’s story offer the softness of suspended time, the war sequences are what time becomes when it hardens. The intrusion of adulthood and historical responsibility has become total. There is no intimacy here, only proximity. The neighbor is not a friend but a nuisance. A letter cannot be remembered. Even the self is fragmented, suspended between dislocation and dissociation. The war has destroyed the continuity of being.

The most painful detail is that the past offers no comfort, because it is not past. It is present, and unreachable. Sarah’s consciousness moves between worlds not through memory, but through possession. The war does not obliterate her former self—it dislocates it, leaving her stranded between what was and what cannot be again. This is not elegy. It is haunting.

In Carmilla, too, the narrator is caught in the aftermath of a disruption that has rendered time incoherent. Laura speaks from a future where order has been restored, where the vampire has been staked and her origins traced—but her voice does not carry the certainty of resolution. She recalls Carmilla not as a monster, but as a presence that still lingers. “Her memory grows dim,” she says, “yet I cannot call it wholly shadowed.” There is a dissonance between the logic of explanation and the ache of what was lost. The language of science—medical, genealogical, historical—has replaced the language of feeling. And yet feeling remains.

In both stories, the adult world imposes a clarity that feels like violence. In Bowen, the war shatters the possibility of reverie. In Le Fanu, patriarchal authority reduces the erotic dream of Carmilla into a case study. Neither resolution is satisfying. The mystery is not solved; it is erased. And in that erasure, a part of the self is amputated.

What lingers in both narratives is not simply loss, but the shape of the world before it was named. Sarah’s pastoral field and Laura’s moonlit castle are not merely settings—they are emotional architectures, built to hold a kind of love the world does not know how to keep. When those architectures collapse, it is not the threat of danger that traumatizes—it is the return of a world in which everything must be accounted for, sorted, placed. In which love must make sense.

But neither Bowen nor Le Fanu lets go entirely. In their endings, they preserve something—the ache, the shiver, the glint of silver light in the corner of the eye. What is lost may be inaccessible, but it is not entirely gone. It survives as atmosphere, as a ghost in the language, as a lingering afterimage that resists being turned into narrative. The war may end, the vampire may be slain, but the reader is left suspended, hovering at the threshold between what was and what might have been.

That threshold is the truest subject of both stories.

Language as Spellwork

In The Happy Autumn Fields and Carmilla, the ghost is not just a character or memory—it is the language itself. Each sentence, with its tremor and drift, evokes a world that resists definition, resists time. Bowen and Le Fanu do not describe experience so much as shape it into mist, writing in a grammar of echo and presence. Their prose is not just a vehicle for story—it is the medium of haunting.
Consider Bowen’s line: “There was no movement in the trees, but the hush had thickened, grown heavy—it was the sort of silence that made you feel something had passed, or someone was listening.” This is not merely description, but a dilation of perception. The sentence stretches out, mirroring the hush it portrays. The air itself becomes conscious—attentive, possibly haunted. In this hush, time becomes ambiguous. Something has happened, or is about to. Or perhaps nothing ever will. The stillness, like so much in Bowen’s work, vibrates.
Its companion in Carmilla arrives with the same hush, transposed into chill: “There was a cold wind that seemed to grow out of the ground, and the moon shone in a way that made the forest path tremble.” Here again, we are in a world whose physical elements are not passive but reactive. The path trembles. The wind rises not from sky, but from earth—as if memory itself had breath. These are landscapes tuned to perception, landscapes that know something. Both authors use setting not as background, but as mood-sensor: the natural world becomes a conductor of unease.
The intimacy of this effect deepens in the body. Bowen writes, “In the golden light, the girls’ skirts stirred over the stubble like petals turning in sleep.” The image is at once innocent and impossibly sensual. The comparison to petals, the phrasing “turning in sleep,” casts the girls’ movement in a kind of dreaming slowness. Their bodies are not moving toward anything. They drift, as if within the breath of the field itself. The dresses are not described to be seen, but to be heard and felt. The stubble pricks, the fabric stirs—it is a tactile and sonic portrait of adolescence suspended in a trance of not-quite-touch. These sensory moments are how Bowen writes closeness without stating it.
So too with Le Fanu, who gives us one of the most aching lines in the Gothic canon: “She kissed me silently with a warmth that made my very soul ache with delight and dread.” This is a kiss that does not clarify—it dissolves. The kiss is not fulfilling but fragmenting. Laura is not comforted; she is stirred into something she cannot name. Delight and dread arrive as twins. As in Bowen, the bodily experience is too large for the moment—too intimate to stay inside the skin. The result is a prose that breaks the frame of narration, letting in sensation before thought can form.
But perhaps the most direct resonance between the two stories emerges in the fantasy of escape. Bowen gives us a sentence that trembles with secret longing: “Sarah imagined she and Henrietta walking on until they simply became part of the light, until the air folded over them and they were no longer seen.” This is not metaphorical. It is a wish—a desire not for experience, but for disappearance. The girls do not want to be held. They want to cease being separate. Their longing is not for consummation but for merging, for the erasure of the self within another. In this sentence, time, space, and personhood dissolve into light. It is Bowen’s answer to Carmilla’s kiss.
These moments show how style becomes structure. Both authors use rhythm, saturation, and deferral to build emotional enclosures—sealed chambers of feeling where nothing is quite said, but everything is felt. In Bowen, clauses drift, double back, stall before closure. In Le Fanu, conjunctions pile sensation atop sensation, suspending us in the ache of the moment. This is not about plot. It is about being held inside a sentence that refuses to let you go.
By writing this way, Bowen does not simply evoke Le Fanu—she extends him. She carries forward a language that allows queerness, longing, dread, and tenderness to coexist in a single clause. She does not quote the Gothic. She reanimates it. In her hands, the sentence becomes a lantern—dim, flickering, and deeply alive.

The Ghost of a Style in the Style of a Ghost

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Happy Autumn Fields does not merely allude to the Gothic. It breathes its air. Beneath the flickering sentences and fractured timelines lies a sustained echo of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla—not in overt homage, but in the deeper registers of tone, structure, and sensibility. Both stories create an emotional architecture in which time slows, light thickens, and intimacy becomes indistinguishable from haunting.

To read these works side by side is to feel a continuity not only of theme but of texture: a language attuned to absence, repetition, and suspended feeling. The forest path that trembles under moonlight, the fields where skirts brush stubble like petals in sleep, the hush that listens—all speak in the same dialect of dislocation. In both stories, the central relationship—a sealed bond between young women—is not explained or resolved. It is protected, preserved, and then ruptured by forces that claim the name of history, of knowledge, of time. But those forces do not win entirely. What remains is not narrative, but trace.

Bowen’s inheritance of Le Fanu is most visible in her refusal to name. The emotional heart of both stories lies not in what is said but in what is withheld—the kiss never described again, the walk into light never completed. What we are left with is not closure, but the shimmer of a mood half-remembered, a bond half-felt. The prose preserves this through rhythm, delay, and the sacred blur of ambiguity.

In the end, neither Laura nor Sarah is returned whole. They emerge from their dream-worlds altered, not by revelation, but by loss. But it is not a moral loss. It is the loss of a possibility—a world where love could be unnamed and safe, where time could circle instead of advance, where a sentence might pause forever and the light never change.

This is the Gothic that survives in Bowen: not the castle and the ghost, but the style that lets them breathe again. A style that knows the most haunting thing is not death, but the memory of a world just before it ended.

om tat sat