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.
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
Literary responses Olivia Manning
Some initial reviews were critical, but OM was delighted when Elizabeth Bowen referred to her masculine impersonality.
qtd. in
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
143
Five years later William Gerhardi wrote that she here represents war in a compass so narrowed...
Literary responses Katherine Mansfield
After Mansfield's death, Woolf wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
qtd. in
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, 12 Apr. 2013, pp. 25-6.
25
KM appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
HM already features in critical surveys of the modern British novel, such as that by Nick Rennison , 2004. A. S. Byatt discusses her (among writers of both sexes including predecessors Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark
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...
Travel Carson McCullers
The couple travelled to France together in 1946, and spent the winter and most of 1947 in Paris, with a side trip to Rome. CMC loved visiting new places both within and beyond...
Literary responses Betty Miller
Her Times obituary might be regarded as damning her novels with faint praise. It called her essentially a feminine novelist—using the epithet with no derogatory connotation—applying her talent to sensitive explorations of feeling.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(27 November 1965): 10
Friends, Associates Lady Ottoline Morrell
LOM continued to entertain in London, hosting such guests as Ethel Smyth , Elizabeth Bowen , Stephen Spender , Max Beerbohm , Hope Mirrlees , Djuna Barnes , Charlie Chaplin , the novelist Henry Green
Friends, Associates Iris Murdoch
She met Brigid Brophy (another friend who was years tempestuously a lover) in 1954. This relationship survived several crises, when Brophy took offence at Murdoch's actions or expressed dislike for her writing. IM met Elizabeth Bowen
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Friends, Associates Julia O'Faolain
Living in different countries, JOF moved in different literary circles, not all Irish or English. In Florence she and her husband were welcomed into the circle of the cosmopolitan writer Violet Trefusis at Villa dell'Ombrellino...
Textual Production Harold Pinter
In 1989 Pinter adapted for television Elizabeth Bowen 's novel The Heat of the Day, 1949, about wartime intrigue and betrayal. His version addresses the corrosive effect of fascism on human relationships.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Production Sylvia Plath
SP was a student guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine, for which she interviewed Elizabeth Bowen .
Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Heinemann, 1991.
51-2
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Simon and Schuster, 1987.
97
Friends, Associates Barbara Pym
BP and Elizabeth Bowen met at the home of mutual friends in St John's Wood, London.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984.
186

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Texts

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