This essay explores the significance of modern French writers, especially Flaubert, Maupassant, and Proust, for Bowen’s thinking and writing. It traces the influence of these figures on her short stories, essays, and novels. Across her career, she reviewed, translated, and cited these and other French authors. In Maupassant, she found a way of mapping the relation between short story and novel onto the division between poetry and prose. From Flaubert, she borrowed a close attention to pacing and rhythm, as well as an interest in the more indirect ways that history might intervene in the novel. Most obviously, perhaps, Proustian notions of memory inflected her own plots and narrative structures, as well as her prose style. Modern French fiction offered Bowen a series of models – and foils – for her own developing theories of character, style, and form. These intertextual resonances reveal how Bowen situated herself in a broader European tradition, rather than British, Irish, or English alone.