Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen. Twayne.
173
Hoogland, Renée C. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York University Press.
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...
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
...
Friends, Associates
Margaret Kennedy
MK
met and formed a writing friendship with fellow author Elizabeth Bowen
.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann.
90
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Production
Margery Lawrence
ML
's ghost stories have been frequently anthologised. They appear in, for instance, Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (1937), The Virago
Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century (1987), and Vampire Stories (1993).
Clute, John, and John Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St Martin’s Press.
under Lawrence, Margery
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...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
Elizabeth Bowen
published an appreciative review of this novel in The New Statesman and Nation on 11 July 1936.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
As controversy has been Henry's domain, reading has been Charlotte's. For ever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. Reading has taught her how sex...
Friends, Associates
Rose Macaulay
In 1921 RM
was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith
at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington.
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
Literary responses
Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond won the James Black Tait prize.
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins.
Growing Up was praised in print by Elizabeth Bowen
and privately by C. P. Snow
. The Times Literary Supplement found the stories distinguished for both their clarity and their good writng but marred by...
