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.
ET
's list of favourite writers proves that her tastes were catholic and that she valued artistry, but says little about influences. Elizabeth Bowen
was a writer who, for her, could do no wrong.
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen.
102
Literary responses
Angela Thirkell
Elizabeth Bowen
, always an admirer of AT
, wrote that if the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer and her novels, he would not know his business. Sales in...
Literary responses
Angela Thirkell
AT
never over-estimated her own talent. She wrote that she and her fictional alter-ego, Laura Morland, each write the same book each year with unfailing regularity, and called her own work not very good books...
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.
20
Again the structure of the book is...
Dedications
Susan Tweedsmuir
ST
published the third of her own novels, The Rainbow through the Rain, which she dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen
.
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.
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...
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
She carried out as much research as available sources permitted into lesbian lives in England of the 1940s, and spent four years working on this novel (as compared with one year for her first). She...
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 et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
EW
's friendship with her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner
began from an impromptu postcard he sent her from Hollywood in 1943: Dear Welty: You are doing fine. You are doing all right. . ....
Travel
Eudora Welty
She visited Mexico as a young woman, and during the early 1950s a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled her to travel to Europe. She spent time in Dublin and stayed with Elizabeth Bowen
. In the 70s...
Literary responses
Eudora Welty
Elizabeth Bowen
is quoted in the Times Literary Supplement praising this volume as great, tender, austere stuff, shot through from beginning to end with beauty. . . . In The Golden Apples Miss Welty would...
The Thinking Reed received high praise from contemporary reviewers, including Elizabeth Bowen
and John Crowe Ransom
.
Rollyson, Carl. Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century. Hodder and Stoughton.
145
Literary responses
Ethel Wilson
The book was well received by reviewers at Punch and The Tatler. Noted novelist Elizabeth Bowen
wrote that it was so remarkable as to convince me that its author should go a long way.
Stouck, David. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. University of Toronto Press.