As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.