Elizabeth Bowen began her career in a period of profound literary upheaval, as some of the most prominent writers of the era attempted to reorient literary fiction away from the social world and towards subjective life. Bowen subscribed to a modernist understanding of literary fiction as fundamentally concerned with investigating and representing the nature of human experience. But if she subscribed to a humdrum humanism that saw little difference between how people experienced the world in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth, she also had an acute sense of the historical variability of writers’ techniques for representing human behaviour. This essay tracks how Bowen’s feelings about modernist modes of experiential description evolved over her career, from her enthusiastic embrace of them in the 1920s to an increased scepticism about their monomaniacal application from the late 1930s onwards – a shift reflected in the changing prominence of stream-of-consciousness styles of writing over her oeuvre. Bowen’s later thematisation of the limits of modernist methods and gradual retreat from them is born not of an aversion to innovation, but of a desire to generate effects that these methods alone are unable to create.