With its realistic setting and characters, it represents something of a bridge between her early burlesques and the soberer novels that made her name.
Kitty has lost her dear friends, Cecilia and Mary Wynne, whose clergyman father's death scattered the family; Cecilia Wynne was sent to India to be married to a much older man she dislikes, and Mary is serving as a companion in the household of a distant relative, Lady Halifax, dependent on that family for even the clothes on her back.
Mrs. Percival goes to great lengths to prevent Kitty from meeting possibly unsuitable young men.
Camilla "professed a love of books without reading, was lively without wit, and generally good humoured without merit" (p. 169).
Edward Stanley turns up at the Percivals’ home, having returned to England unexpectedly, and convinces Kitty to go with him to the ball after all.
Featuring an orphan heroine raised by a censorious aunt, The Bower also includes elements of farce, parody and burlesque (as did earlier juvenalia).
Camilla Stanley (a forerunner of Northanger Abbey's Isabella Thorpe) bonds with Catherine over sentimental novels; while their friendship also opens a conduct book debate over female correspondence: Isabella's mother maintains that “Nothing forms the taste more than sensible & Elegant letters”, while Catherine's aunt objects to “a correspondence between Girls as...the frequent origin of imprudence & Error”.
[8] Romance enters The Bower with Edward Stanley, whose presentation anticipates Henry Crawford or Mr Willoughby; his eventual role as villain or as hero remains undefined.