Travel agencies and trinket shops: representations of women of business in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction

Abstract

Emmeline Summers, the co-owner of a travel agency in the 1930s, appears to have no real head for business, and perhaps even less for advertising strategies: she has a slogan for her business ‘ “Move dangerously” – a variant of “Live dangerously” you see’, she says, but then asks, ‘I wonder,’ […] raising her eyebrows anxiously, ‘if it is such a very good slogan? It seems to need some explaining –’[1] This paper will look at representations of the practices of women’s leadership in business through a discussion of two characters from the novels of Elizabeth Bowen. The first is Emmeline Summers in Bowen’s fourth novel, To the North (1933); the second is Clare Burkin-Jones, the owner of a gift shop, ‘Mopsie Pie’, in Bowen’s penultimate novel, The Little Girls (1963). This business seems to be far more successful than Emmeline Summers’ travel agency; indeed the first description of the business suggests that this is a profitable enterprise with a good marketing vision, for the ‘wares were some grouped, some spread, in measured profusion […] nor was any of this in vain […] five or six gazing persons were moving about in a tranced state which looked like culminating in buying.’[2] Placing these two novels within their historical context, this paper will examine the portrayal of these two women as leaders in very different eras and asks if these women, the former rather inept and the latter an effective businesswoman, are, in fact, representative of women in business in these periods of great change and questioning if Bowen’s novels highlight differing societal attitudes to women in commerce during the thirty years between the publication dates of the two novels. [1] Bowen, E (1933:1999) To the North. London: Vintage, p.23.[2] Bowen, E (1963:1982) The Little Girls. London: Penguin Books, p.137.