Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen,
CBECBE and C.B.E. are abbreviations for Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a grade in the Order of the British Empire.Other uses include:*Calgary Board of Education, public school board for the city of Calgary, Alberta...
(7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an
Anglo-IrishAnglo-Irish was a term used historically to describe a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser...
novelist and short story writer.
Elixabeth Bowen was born in
DublinDublin is the largest city and capital of Ireland. It is officially known in Irish as Baile Átha Cliath or Áth Cliath ; the English name comes from the Irish Dubh Linn meaning "black pool". It is located near the midpoint of Ireland's east coast, at the mouth of the River Liffey and at the...
and later brought to Bowen’s Court in
County CorkCounty Cork is one of the traditional counties of Ireland. It is located within the province of Munster, and was named after the city of Cork...
where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in
HytheHythe is a small coastal market town on the edge of Romney Marsh, in the District of Shepway on the south coast of Kent. The word Hythe or Hithe is an Old English word meaning Haven or Landing Place....
. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts.
She was educated at Downe House School, under the headship of
Olive WillisOlive Margaret Willis was an English educationist and headmistress. She founded Downe House School and was its head for nearly forty years, from 1907 to 1946.-Early life:...
.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen,
CBECBE and C.B.E. are abbreviations for Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a grade in the Order of the British Empire.Other uses include:*Calgary Board of Education, public school board for the city of Calgary, Alberta...
(7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an
Anglo-IrishAnglo-Irish was a term used historically to describe a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser...
novelist and short story writer.
Life
Elixabeth Bowen was born in
DublinDublin is the largest city and capital of Ireland. It is officially known in Irish as Baile Átha Cliath or Áth Cliath ; the English name comes from the Irish Dubh Linn meaning "black pool". It is located near the midpoint of Ireland's east coast, at the mouth of the River Liffey and at the...
and later brought to Bowen’s Court in
County CorkCounty Cork is one of the traditional counties of Ireland. It is located within the province of Munster, and was named after the city of Cork...
where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in
HytheHythe is a small coastal market town on the edge of Romney Marsh, in the District of Shepway on the south coast of Kent. The word Hythe or Hithe is an Old English word meaning Haven or Landing Place....
. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts.
She was educated at Downe House School, under the headship of
Olive WillisOlive Margaret Willis was an English educationist and headmistress. She founded Downe House School and was its head for nearly forty years, from 1907 to 1946.-Early life:...
. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the
Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half of the...
, becoming good friends with
Rose MacaulayDame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE , affectionately known as Emilie, was a writer...
, who helped her find a publisher for her first book,
Encounters (1923).
In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
. The marriage has been described as "a sexless but contented union" . She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer
Sean O FaolainSeán Proinsias Ó Faoláin was an Irish short story writer. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1986.Born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland, Sean Ó Faoláin wrote his first stories in the 1920s. Through 90 stories, written over a period of 60 years, Ó Faoláin charts the...
and at least one
lesbianLesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
entanglement, with the American poet,
May SartonMay Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton , an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Many of her works reflect the lesbian experience.-Biography:...
.
Bowen inherited Bowen's Court in 1930, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality
.
Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, where Alan Cameron died a few months later. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1959 the house was sold and demolished.
Bowen received recognition for her work, being awarded the 1969
James Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for
Eva Trout as well as Doctorates in Literature from
Trinity College, DublinTrinity College Dublin , corporately designated as the Provost, Fellows and Scholars of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", and is the only constituent college of...
(1949) and the
University of OxfordThe University of Oxford , located in the UK city of Oxford, is the oldest surviving university in the English-speaking world and is regarded as one of the world's leading academic institutions. Although the exact date of foundation remains unclear, there is evidence of teaching there as far back...
(1952). She was also awarded the CBE.
After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of
cancerCancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells display uncontrolled growth , invasion , and sometimes metastasis...
in 1973, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy church yard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court. A commemoration of her life is held annually in Farahy church.
Assessment
Elizabeth Bowen was greatly interested in ‘life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off,’ or in other words, in the innocence of orderly life, and in the eventual, irrepressible forces that transform experience. Bowen also examined the betrayal and secrets that lie beneath the veneer of respectability. The style of her works is highly wrought and owes much to literary modernism. She was an admirer of
filmFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
and influenced by the filmmaking techniques of her day. The locations in which Bowen's works are set often bear heavily on the psychology of the characters and, thus, also on the plots.
Selected works
Novels
- The Hotel (1927)
- The Last September
The Last September is a novel by the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen published in 1929, concerning life at the country mansion of Danielstown, Cork during the Irish War of Independence.-Plot:...
(1929)
- Friends and Relations ( 1931)
- To the North (1932)
- The House in Paris
The House in Paris is a novel by Elizabeth Bowen first published in 1935.The novel details a day spent in a house in Paris by young Henrietta and Leopold, whose visits coincide. Henrietta is passing through Paris on her way to meet her grandmother, and Leopold is waiting to meet his mother for the...
(1935)
- The Death of the Heart
The Death of the Heart is a 1938 novel by Elizabeth Bowen set between the two world wars. It is about a sixteen year old orphan, Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas and falls in love with Eddie, a friend of her sister-in-law. The novel was adapted into a 1986 TV...
(1939)
- The Heat of the Day (1949)
- A World of Love (1955)
- The Little Girls (1964)
- The Good Tiger (1965)
- Eva Trout
Eva Trout is Elizabeth Bowen's final novel. First published in 1968, it is about a young woman—the eponymous heroine—who, abandoned by her mother just after her birth, raised by nurses and nannies and educated by governesses all hired by her millionaire father, has difficulty acting and...
(1968)
Short stories
- Encounters (1923)
- Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929)
- The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934)
- The Easter Egg Party (1938 in The London Mercury
The London Mercury was the name of several periodicals published in London from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The earliest was a newspaper that appeared during the Exclusion Bill crisis; it lasted only 56 issues...
)
- Look At All Those Roses (1941)
- The Demon Lover
"The Demon Lover" is a short story by Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. It was first published in 1945 in a book titled The Demon Lover and Other Stories....
and Other Stories (1945)
- Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (1959)
- A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965)
- The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1980)
- Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories (1978)
Non-fiction
- Bowen's Court (1942)
- Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942)
- English Novelists (1942)
- Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement (1946)
- Why Do I Write: An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (1948)
- Collected Impressions (1950)
- The Shelbourne (1951)
- A Time in Rome (1960)
- Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (1962)
- Pictures and Conversations (1975)
- The Mulberry Tree (1999).
Biography
- Victoria Glendinning
Hon Victoria Glendinning CBE is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.- Biography :She was born in Sheffield to a...
: Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977)
Critical Studies
- Hermione Lee
Hermione Lee, CBE is President of Wolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.-Biography:Hermione Lee grew up in...
: Elizabeth Bowen (1981)
- Phyllis Lassner: Elizabeth Bowen (1990)
- Maud Ellmann: Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003)
- Neil Corcoran: Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (2004)
- Susan Osborn: Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (2009)
External links