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.
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 Margery Allingham
This novel was scorned by crime reviewers but praised for imagination and dramatic power by such discriminating critics as Elizabeth Bowen .
Martin, Richard. Ink in Her Blood: The Life and Crime Fiction of Margery Allingham. UMI Research Press.
178
Paul Reynolds , MA 's US agent, wrote, I found it difficult...
Literary responses Monica Dickens
Persephone 's webside quotes two excellent reviews from the date of first publication—one from John Betjeman and one from Elizabeth Bowen .
Persephone Books. http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/.
Literary responses Margery Allingham
Early critics of MA 's work saw her as a young revitaliser of the detective form, along with Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes. Later she was linked with the slightly older Dorothy Sayers 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
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...
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.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne.
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 Sybille Bedford
Reviewer Pamela Petro notes the importance in SB 's works of her own distinctly worldly voice, whose deliberately knowing, clever, and aristocratic qualities are likely on occasion to irk more modern sensibilities.
Petro, Pamela. “A traveler’s tales”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
xx
, No. 10-11, p. 35.
35
David Leavitt
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 Mary Renault
Lesbianism had been the subject of novels in the 1920s and 30s. Virginia Woolf 's Mrs. Dalloway and Elizabeth Bowen 's The Hotel had both been criticised (the latter severely) for sympathetic treatments of emotional...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.