Just as Elizabeth Bowen’s life was shaped by monumental and international conflicts, so war fundamentally shaped her short stories and novels. The First World War haunts Bowen’s debut novel, The Hotel; the Irish War of Independence transforms the very landscape of Ireland in The Last September; and the Second World War draws up numerous conflicts of allegiance and communication in The Heat of the Day and short stories such as ‘Mysterious Kôr’. Throughout these instances, war creates complicated feelings of simultaneity, where the past and future collapse into an inarticulable present, as can be felt in the futile performance of polite society among the Anglo-Irish in The Last September. As much as that suspension of time crushes any sense of futurity, it also opens the opportunity for reimagining the existing orders of the world; hence, war can constrain expression, as with the hedged communication in the short story ‘Careless Talk’, and afford sexual liberation for characters in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ and ‘Summer Night’. For Bowen, the tensions thrown up in war offer not a dialectic but a series of ruptures that can only be experienced, not resolved.