Elizabeth Bowen

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Standard Name: Bowen, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
Nickname: Bitha
EB published ten novels, seventy-nine short stories, a history of her Anglo-Irish family, and a large body of critical and other nonfictional writing. Her novels and short stories blend romance (the perils of innocence, and its loss, are favourite themes) with comedy and satire, and sometimes with hints of the occult. She was well known and widely read during her life, which occupied about three-quarters of the twentieth century. Eudora Welty claimed that EBwrote with originality, bounty, vigor, style, beauty up to the last.
Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Twayne, 1991.
173
Hoogland, Renée C. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York University Press, 1994.
2
Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Twayne, 1991.
157-60
Black and white head-and-shoulders photograph of Elizabeth Bowen seen in profile, with her head slightly turned. She is wearing a dark, high-collared jacket with a polka-dotted scarf around her neck; her hair, dark with a white streak, is pulled back in a bun, and she is wearing dark lipstick.
Black-and-white closeup portrait photograph of Elizabeth Bowen, 1949.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Muriel Spark
This came at a time when she was submitting her work (almost entirely poetry) in large quantity and having it rejected. She submitted this story as Aquarius: real names were not revealed until the...
death Charles Darwin
CD , naturalist, died at his estate of Downe in Kent, which became a girls' boarding-school in 1907 and is now a museum.
Elizabeth Bowen , who was a girl at the school, was...
Dedications Susan Tweedsmuir
ST published the third of her own novels, The Rainbow through the Rain, which she dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen .
OCLC WorldCat.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Dedications Eudora Welty
EW 's next collected volume, containing seven pieces, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, was dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen .
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
New York Times. New York Times Company.
4
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012].
667
Dedications Elizabeth Taylor
ET published her ninth novel, The Soul of Kindness. She dedicated it to Elizabeth Bowen , using the latter's married name of Elizabeth Cameron to indicate that this was a personal, not only a literary, relationship.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
81n3
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books, 2009.
350
Education Anne Ridler
Downe House had been founded at Charles Darwin 's old home by Olive Willis , a remarkable woman who was still headmistress, who exercised an important influence on AR , and whose biography Ridler later...
Education Stella Gibbons
Writers Elizabeth Bowen and Christina Hole enrolled in this course at roughly the same time as SG .
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998.
33
Family and Intimate relationships Rosamond Lehmann
In the early stages of the turmoil which the Spanish Civil War brought into her life, RL met and fell in love with Welsh writer Goronwy Rees at the home of Elizabeth Bowen , who...
Family and Intimate relationships Rosamond Lehmann
RL originally met Day-Lewis at Elizabeth Bowen 's home in London in 1936. Their next meeting followed on her reviewing his Poems in Wartime, 1940, for the New Statesman. She called him a...
Family and Intimate relationships Iris Murdoch
Bayley (who was six years younger than Murdoch) appeared to her as an escape from her painful, dominated relationship with Elias Canetti .
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins, 2002.
374
He later held one of Oxford's few Chairs as Thomas Warton...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
In her day EJ knew most of the London literary world. She met Agatha Christie , whom she described as the most elegantly dressed elderly woman I have ever seen.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
148
She counted among her...
Friends, Associates F. Tennyson Jesse
Gordon Place became the centre of an active female literary community, which included Elizabeth Bowen , Rose Macaulay , Virginia Woolf , Ivy Low (who was also a good friend of Viola Meynell ), Ivy Compton-Burnett
Friends, Associates Susan Tweedsmuir
ST made her own the friendship with Elizabeth Robins that had begun because Robins was a friend of her mother's. She was also close to playwright-producer Harley Granville-Barker and particularly to his second wife, the...
Friends, Associates Carson McCullers
Other friends who not of this group but who were important to CMC included several distinguished writers: Eudora Welty , Katherine Anne Porter , Tennessee Williams , Elizabeth Ames (director of the writers' community at...
Friends, Associates Molly Keane
Molly's close friends included novelist Elizabeth Bowen and actress Peggy Ashcroft . Visiting the Perry family home at Woodrooff, she met John Perry , who later collaborated with her on plays, and Bobby Keane ...

Timeline

1907
Educationalist Olive Willis founded a school for girls at Downe House in Kent, formerly occupied by Charles Darwin . Downe House School began with one pupil, five teachers, and no financial backing.
Autumn1945
The second number of Orion. A Miscellany appeared: Rosamond Lehmann was one of the editors, along with C. Day Lewis and Edwin Muir .
March 1949
Elizabeth Bowen 's feature on 1918 was broadcast on the BBC 's Third Programme series A Year I Remember.
9 December 2006-17 July 2007
The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of photographs of women writers, mostly novelists, from 1920 to 1960.