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 Mavis Gallant
On the subject of Gallant's first The New Yorker story, Madeline's Birthday, Mordecai Richler —signing his name as Mordy—wrote to Douglas M. Gibson to say i saw mavis's story in the new yorker. i'm...
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 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...
Literary responses Pat Barker
Reviewer Lara Feigel found that PB 's allusions to actual, historical people (Paul sharing sentiments, his place of work, the circumstances of his falling in love, with Graham Greene ; Elinor owing something to Elizabeth Bowen
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Leonard Woolf , reading the typescript of this novel at the end of February 1941, judged it to be more vigorous and pulled together than most of her other books, to have more depth and...
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
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
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...
Author summary Molly Keane
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...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Brigid Brophy wrote that she valued very highly indeed the considered and considerable despair at the heart of this novel.
qtd. in
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
85
From her dedicatee, Elizabeth Bowen , ET received with a letter praising the book's...
Residence Elizabeth Jenkins
In 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, EJ 's father bought her a beautiful but shabby eight-roomed Georgian house in a street called Downshire Hill in Hampstead, where she lived...
Textual Features Marjorie Bowen
MB credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson 's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson 's Miriam and...
Textual Features Vita Sackville-West
The letters VSW exchanged with her husband were absolutely crucial to the creation and the sustenance of their relationship: they expressed such closeness by letter that it almost took the place of sexual or literal...
Textual Features E. M. Delafield
This tale, about of two young girls who rely on their imagination to escape the trauma they experience during war, is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bowen 's wartime tales of psychic aberration in the face of...
Textual Features Anne Enright
She included stories by Mary Lavin , Elizabeth Bowen , Edna O'Brien , Clare Boylan , Maeve Brennan , Anne Devlin , Claire Keegan , and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne .
Enright, Anne. The Forgotten Waltz. McClelland and Stewart, 2011.
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