Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes was published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, Bowen’s last novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970 (the prize’s second year). Eva Trout is a large, wealthy, socially graceless young woman — orphaned, emotionally inarticulate, prone to sudden flights and elaborate fantasies. She acquires a child (Jeremy, a deaf-mute boy) through obscure means and spends the novel moving between England, France, and America, constructing provisional lives and abandoning them.
The novel is Bowen’s most formally experimental work: its chronology is disrupted, its narrative voice shifts unpredictably, and Eva herself resists the kind of psychological coherence that Bowen’s earlier heroines (Portia, Stella, Lois) achieved through suffering. Eva is opaque — to other characters and to the reader. She cannot articulate her inner life because she may not have one in the conventional literary sense.
The ending is violent and abrupt — Jeremy, now a teenager, shoots Eva dead at Victoria Station with a gun he believes is a toy. Critics remain divided: is this Bowen’s acknowledgment that her kind of novel (psychological, mannered, dependent on articulate consciousness) could no longer be written? Or is it simply a dark joke about the failure of language to connect people?
Collecting Eva Trout
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1968): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $60–$150
- US first (Knopf): $30–$80