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.
173
Hoogland, Renée C. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York University Press.
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Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Twayne.
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...
Literary responses Monica Dickens
Persephone 's webside quotes two excellent reviews from the date of first publication—one from John Betjeman and one from Elizabeth Bowen .
Persephone Books. http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/.
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.
contents
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 Mavis Gallant
On the subject of Gallant's first The New Yorker story, Madeline's Birthday, Mordecai Richler —signing his name as Mordy—wrote to Douglas M. Gibson to say i saw mavis's story in the new yorker. i'm...
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.
33
Literary responses Stella Gibbons
SG 's Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Femina Vie-Heureuse, worth forty pounds (as Webb 's Precious Bane had done only seven years previously). Gibbons's award was presented in June 1934.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
Textual Production Henry Green
HG 's rather small band of admirers (who have included Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty ) have always felt him to be seriously underestimated.
Friends, Associates H. D.
After her move to England, Ezra Pound introduced HD to his circle of friends, many of whom were important figures in the modernist movement. They included W. B. Yeats , T. S. Eliot ,...
Textual Production Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Literary responses Susan Hill
Critic Hermione Lee , reviewing the collection for the Guardian, praised SH 's tender attention to detail, and likened her to L. P. Hartley and Elizabeth Bowen .
Lee, Hermione. “Like Buttons in a Box”. Guardian Unlimited.
Literary responses Elizabeth Jane Howard
It was after this novel that Robert Ostermann wrote of EJH in the National Observer as in the same class as Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen : female novelists of impressive intelligence and sensibilities that...
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...
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.
148
She counted among her...
Literary responses Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ said this was her own favourite among her books.
“Elizabeth Jenkins”. The Telegraph.
Elizabeth Bowen said that sitting up late reading it in bed left her (in an Irish colloquialism) lying stretched for dead.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
140
The book roused...

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. 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.