strangeness at the end of may

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Children all askew, often sad, and aside, long-legged girls and young women shift from place to place for obscure reasons, strong compulsions run amok, they're observant, these long-legged girls and young women, as you need to be if you live on shifting sands. Dodging what? With a view to what? Her teacher Miss Smith asks Eva Trout, age sixteen, newly arrived at the school, if 'here' seemed strange still. Eva replies 'Anywhere would seem strange that did not'.

All Elizabeth Bowen's girl creatures can relate to this. The wayward English chill and freedom, hairpins flying, as with Virginia Woolf. I too can get there in a trice. The pleasure of pinning strangeness to the page, this is the locus, the focus, of reading as the season shifts.