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 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.
128,129
Literary responses Elizabeth Jane Howard
It was after this novel that Robert Ostermann wrote of EJH in the National Observer as in the same class as Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen : female novelists of impressive intelligence and sensibilities that...
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 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 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
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.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
160
ICB received a...
Literary responses Angela Thirkell
Elizabeth Bowen , always an admirer of AT , wrote that if the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer and her novels, he would not know his business. Sales in...
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 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 Ivy Compton-Burnett
Of this novel ICB wrote, I have never had such superficial reviews.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
190
They did, however, praise the book, especially in the case of reviewers who were also novelists, like Elizabeth Bowen , Pamela Hansford Johnson
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 Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ said this was her own favourite among her books.
“Elizabeth Jenkins”. The Telegraph.
Elizabeth Bowen said that sitting up late reading it in bed left her (in an Irish colloquialism) lying stretched for dead.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
140
The book roused...
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...
Literary responses Henry Handel Richardson
Where Michael Ackland has recently seen fantasy, omission, and transformation (with valuable light shed on HHR 's attitudes and imaginative life),
Ackland, Michael. Henry Handel Richardson: A Life. Cambridge University Press.
2
Elizabeth Bowen , reviewing the book on its first appearance, judged very differently...
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...

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