The Last September was published by Constable in 1929. Danielstown is a Big House in County Cork — one of the great Anglo-Irish estates whose occupants, the Naylors, have lived in Ireland for generations while remaining essentially English in culture and loyalty. It is September 1920: the IRA is active throughout the county, burning the houses of the Ascendancy class; British soldiers are billeted in the area; and the Naylors continue their social round of tennis parties, dinners, and house visits as if nothing were happening.
Lois Farquar, the Naylors’ nineteen-year-old niece, is at the center of the novel — caught between an unsuitable romance with a British soldier (Gerald Lesworth) and a half-acknowledged sympathy with the invisible Irish around her. She encounters an IRA gunman in the shrubbery; she says nothing. Gerald is killed in an ambush; she grieves but also feels freed.
Bowen drew directly on her own childhood at Bowen’s Court, her family’s Big House in County Cork. The novel’s power derives from its refusal to dramatize the political violence directly — it happens at the edges, reported in conversation, glimpsed through windows, and the Anglo-Irish characters’ inability to acknowledge it is both their defining characteristic and the reason they will be destroyed.
Collecting The Last September
First edition (Constable, London, 1929): Boards with dust jacket. Small print run for a second novel.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $800–$2,000
- Very good in jacket: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $100–$300