Anglican in Burgundy

       Anyone interested in country house literature as a genre will probably be a fan of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September and Bowen's Court . Those of us who are motivated to take on a very old building in the country instinctively want to read about how others have also battled with decay, draughts and damp while managing to maintain a civilised way of living... except, of course, that sadly in Elizabeth Bowen's case the struggle naught availed, and she ultimately gave up, selling her ancestral home, Bowen's Court in County Cork, and retiring to a most unlikely and undistinguished-looking suburban house in South-East England. Presumably she finally got to the point where the lure of fitted carpets and central heating was just too strong to resist.      Above is the famous photo of Iris Murdoch on her best behaviour among Elizabeth Bowen's dinner guests at Bowens Court.       There are two good books det...

       Reading Iris Murdoch's 1964 novel The Italian Girl recently, I was interested to find a reference to a Burgundian work of art. In the book, the sculptor Otto, unhappily married to Isabel, blurts out to his brother Edmund: "The spiritual disadvantages of marriage are crippling. I could have been a good man if I hadn't married. Sometimes I think women really are the source of evil. They are such dreamers. Sin is a sort of unconsciousness, a not-knowing. Women are like that, like the bottle. Remember that dreaming Eve at Autun, that dreaming, swimming, dazed Eve of Gislebertus?"       The dreaming Eve of Autun then becomes something of a reference point in the story, which I will not spoil for anyone who hasn't yet read it!      The dreaming, swimming, dazed Eve, as Dame Iris put it so well, was originally part of the west entrance of Autun Cathedral, whose tympanum is regarded, along with that of the basilica of Vézelay, as on...