Like most of Bowen’s stories, this is one that reveals more and more about itself every time I read it. I love first of all the description with which it opens, two bored and mutually disappointed young people driving back to London through a curiously inert Suffolk landscape, empty and still and hot. Their car breaks down half a mile after they’ve past a house, the front covered in the eponymous roses. What happens after that unfolds in Bowen’s best manner, slowly revealing things that remain unspoken and inconclusive, raising all sorts of questions and reflecting the relationship of the central protagonists.
First published in Look at All Those Roses, Cape, 1941, and variously reprinted, including in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Penguin, 1983
A Personal Anthology 