Elizabeth Bowen

-
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.
qtd. in
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
Textual Features E. M. Delafield
This tale, about of two young girls who rely on their imagination to escape the trauma they experience during war, is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bowen 's wartime tales of psychic aberration in the face of...
Textual Features Vita Sackville-West
The letters VSW exchanged with her husband were absolutely crucial to the creation and the sustenance of their relationship: they expressed such closeness by letter that it almost took the place of sexual or literal...
Textual Features Anne Enright
She included stories by Mary Lavin , Elizabeth Bowen , Edna O'Brien , Clare Boylan , Maeve Brennan , Anne Devlin , Claire Keegan , and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne .
Enright, Anne. The Forgotten Waltz. McClelland and Stewart, 2011.
contents
Textual Features Susan Tweedsmuir
The opening proper of this volume invokes with some trepidation George Sand 's statement that there is nothing more tedious than the dregs of an old régime.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. A Winter Bouquet. G. Duckworth, 1954.
20
Again the structure of the book is...
Textual Features Mary Renault
Lesbianism had been the subject of novels in the 1920s and 30s. Virginia Woolf 's Mrs. Dalloway and Elizabeth Bowen 's The Hotel had both been criticised (the latter severely) for sympathetic treatments of emotional...
Textual Features Sybille Bedford
Reviewer Pamela Petro notes the importance in SB 's works of her own distinctly worldly voice, whose deliberately knowing, clever, and aristocratic qualities are likely on occasion to irk more modern sensibilities.
Petro, Pamela. “A traveler’s tales”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
xx
, No. 10-11, July 2003, p. 35.
35
David Leavitt
Textual Features Marjorie Bowen
MB credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson 's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson 's Miriam and...
Residence Elizabeth Jenkins
In 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, EJ 's father bought her a beautiful but shabby eight-roomed Georgian house in a street called Downshire Hill in Hampstead, where she lived...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Brigid Brophy wrote that she valued very highly indeed the considered and considerable despair at the heart of this novel.
qtd. in
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
85
From her dedicatee, Elizabeth Bowen , ET received with a letter praising the book's...
Author summary Molly Keane
MK had two distinct phases in her writing career. Between 1926 and 1961 she wrote, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, eleven novels and four plays. After almost twenty years of silence, she published...
Author summary Rosamond Lehmann
RL has received less critical attention than other women modernists, especially her closest literary colleagues Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf . However, after the reprinting of her work in the 1980s, her seven novels, her...
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
Literary responses Joanna Cannan
These books were praised by a whole roster of other women novelists: Elizabeth Bowen , Phyllis Bentley , and Pamela Hansford Johnson . Bowen observed of the first that there was much more to this...
Literary responses Rosamond Lehmann
This book received very positive reviews from (among others) Elizabeth Janeway in the New York Times, Elizabeth Bowen in New Republic, Virginia Peterson in the New York Herald Tribune, Simon Raven in...
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Jonathan Yardley , reviewing for the Washington Post, stressed O'Brien's brilliance and her nationality. If what you're looking for is a map of Ireland, the fiction of Edna O'Brien will do just fine. She...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Death of the Heart. Victor Gollancz.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Demon Lover and Other Stories. Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Evolution of a Novelist”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 2424, p. 395.
Bowen, Elizabeth, editor. The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories. Faber, 1937.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Good Tiger. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Hotel. Constable and Company.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The House in Paris. Victor Gollancz.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September. Constable and Company.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September. Collected Edition, Jonathan Cape, 1948.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Little Girls. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Mulberry Tree”. The Old School, edited by Graham Greene, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 37-51.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Shelbourne. George G. Harrap and Company, 1951.
Bowen, Elizabeth. To the North. Victor Gollancz.