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 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 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 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...
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 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...
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...
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 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 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 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.
contents
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, 1954.
20
Again the structure of the book is...

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