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
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...
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...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Taylor
ET wrote that she liked routine and was always disconcerted when I am asked for my life story, for nothing sensational, thank heavens, has ever happened.
qtd. in
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
139
She had a passion for modern painting, and...
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, 2003.
128,129
Literary responses Rebecca West
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, 1995.
145
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
At Mrs. Lippincote's set the tone for reception of ET by attracting very mixed reviews. She treasured praise from L. P. Hartley , Richard Church (who was reminded of Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway), and...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Early praise for MW 's work came from such different writers as Marghanita Laski and Susan Hill . Other commentators likened her work to that of Rose Macaulay , Elizabeth Bowen , Barbara Pym ...
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
Like ET 's first book, this was praised by distinguished but not unanimous voices: Elizabeth Bowen found an exciting distinction about every page, and Rosamond Lehmann noted the stripped, piercing feminine wit and called ET
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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
5: 303-4 and 303n1
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
Reviews of A Game of Hide and Seek included high praise from Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Bowen (some consolation to ET for her problems with her US publisher), but also carping which she found deeply...
Literary responses Rosamond Lehmann
Elizabeth Bowen published an appreciative review of this novel in The New Statesman and Nation on 11 July 1936.
LeStourgeon, Diana. Rosamond Lehmann. Twayne, 1965.
87, 148
Ralph Straus and Cecil Day Lewis were also lavish with their praise. Q. D. Leavis
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...
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 Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen , in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB 's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
qtd. in
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
160
ICB received a...

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