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
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...
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, 2004.
2
Elizabeth Bowen , reviewing the book on its first appearance, judged very differently...
Textual Production Dorothy Richardson
In her correspondence Richardson addresses a great range of topics, including her own varied reading. She comments on women writers from Julian of Norwich through Jane Austen , Emily and Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Textual Production Anne Ridler
AR published a biography of her own old headmistress: Olive Willis and Downe House , An Adventure in Education, with a foreword by Elizabeth Bowen .
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2025, Numerous volumes.
80: 358
Ridler, Anne. Olive Willis and Downe House. John Murray, 1967.
1-5
Education Anne Ridler
Downe House had been founded at Charles Darwin 's old home by Olive Willis , a remarkable woman who was still headmistress, who exercised an important influence on AR , and whose biography Ridler later...
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...
Anthologization Muriel Spark
This came at a time when she was submitting her work (almost entirely poetry) in large quantity and having it rejected. She submitted this story as Aquarius: real names were not revealed until the...
Dedications Elizabeth Taylor
ET published her ninth novel, The Soul of Kindness. She dedicated it to Elizabeth Bowen , using the latter's married name of Elizabeth Cameron to indicate that this was a personal, not only a literary, relationship.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
81n3
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books, 2009.
350
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Taylor
ET wrote that she liked routine and was always disconcerted when I am asked for my life story, for nothing sensational, thank heavens, has ever happened.
qtd. in
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
139
She had a passion for modern painting, and...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Taylor
Friends said that ET was very shy, but cared very much for very few people.
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen, 1986.
44
She was lucky in that Ivy Compton-Burnett (who was a generation older than she was, and notoriously difficult) and...
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 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 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...
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...
Textual Production Elizabeth Taylor
ET felt strongly about the advantages of men over women as writers, especially over mothers. I don't think anything enrages me so much as seeing in famous men's autobiographies photographs of their studies, libraries, quiet...

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