Review of Valerie O’Brien’s “‘A Genius for Unreality’: Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout

摘要

Valerie O’Brien’s article offers new insights into the mind of Elizabeth Bowen’seponymous heroine Eva, whose character has been subject to ongoing debate. Althoughliterary critics have often described the character of Eva as opaque, inexplicable, or flatbecause of her non-normative behaviour, O’Brien argues that from a literary cognitivepoint of view, Eva’s neurodivergent behaviour and sensory relation to the world, in fact,gestures towards a complex interiority.