As with many modernist writers, Elizabeth Bowen's art is typified by a certain poise so that her characters who desire to manage emotion, to be in control of themselves within the subtle codes of modern society, mirror her own conception of the novel form that revolves around containment and restraint. Hers is an art of constant deflection and deferral, of making the bric-à-brac of the contemporary world – all the objects and stuff of modernity – the reservoir of all those intense feelings that cannot be admitted in the human sphere. In her Irish writing, much of this acute emotion is bound up in the bricks and mortar of the Anglo-Irish Big House: its centrifugal presence is the centre round which, and through which, its inhabitants circle and find meaning. Bowen's most well-known Big House novel, The Last September (1929) set in the autumn of 1920 during the Irish War of Independence, can be read as a multifaceted and sophisticated response to the reality of a newly independent Ireland from a writer emerging from within the class who had been dispossessed of political power and position.