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.
2
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
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
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.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, pp. 25-6.
25
KM appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Literary responses Olivia Manning
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...
Literary responses Olivia Manning
Some initial reviews were critical, but OM was delighted when Elizabeth Bowen referred to her masculine impersonality.
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus.
143
Five years later William Gerhardi wrote that she here represents war in a compass so narrowed...
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.
203
Bensen, Alice. Rose Macaulay. Twayne.
154
A reprint of 1959 quotes on its dustjacket a chorus of praise. John Betjeman and Sir Compton Mackenzie called the novel RM 's...
Literary responses Rose Macaulay
RM later wrote, it's really a book for those who have travelled to the same place, or are about to.
Macaulay, Rose. Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay 1950-1952. Editor Babington Smith, Constance, Fontana.
70
Elizabeth Bowen called it an enchanting book, of high intelligence.
Lefanu, Sarah. Rose Macaulay. Virago.
243
Biographer Sarah Lefanu
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...
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.
LeStourgeon, Diana. Rosamond Lehmann. Twayne.
87, 148
Ralph Straus and Cecil Day Lewis were also lavish with their praise. Q. D. Leavis
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...
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
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.

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