Elizabeth Bowen

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The British writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) dealt with the strivings of the individual will to fulfill itself in an alien and hostile world. She is considered a major British novelist of the 20th century.

Born in Dublin on June 7, 1899, Elizabeth Bowen lived in Ireland until the age of seven, when her family moved to England. Her education completed, she returned to Dublin in 1916 to work in a hospital for World War I veterans. Two years later she moved back to England and enrolled in the London County Council School of Art. In 1923 she married Alan Charles Cameron and published her first collection of short stories.

In 1925 Bowen and her husband moved to Oxford, where she became friends with many literary intellectuals, among them Isaiah Berlin and Lord David Cecil. There she wrote her first four novels: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931), and To the North (1932). The first two concern the dawning of romantic love in the young, innocent heroines, who eventually become aware of its futility, while the last two concern the destructiveness of illicit love.

In 1935 Bowen and her husband returned to London, where her friends included Cyril Connolly, Virginia Woolf, and many of the Bloomsbury group. In that same year she published her fifth novel, The House in Paris. Again the theme is the destructiveness of romantic excess. It depicts an affair which results in pregnancy, the suicide of the lover, and the heroine's rejection of her child, though in the end she begins to reconcile herself to the reality of her situation. In 1938 Bowen published her best-known and perhaps finest novel, The Death of the Heart, about an idealistic young girl whose demands for honesty and openness are met with hostility by her family.

During World War II Bowen worked as an air raid warden and wrote for the Ministry of Information. In her seventh novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), the society which in earlier novels was seen as inimical to romantic illusions has disappeared entirely in the chaos of war, and the protagonists float in a sea of their own confusion. After the death of her husband in 1952, Bowen returned to Ireland. Except for numerous trips to the United States as a lecturer, she remained there and continued to write, publishing A World of Love in 1955. The story concerns three women who become aware that their romantic fantasies about a man dead for many years have kept them from living in the present.

In 1960 she returned to Oxford. She published The Little Girls in 1964 and Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes in 1968. The latter concerns a heroine whose romantic passion blinds her to the reality of other people, causing them pain and bringing about her questionably accidental death at the hands of her illegitimate son. In addition to her 10 novels, Bowen published several collections of short stories, numerous reviews, and many other critical pieces. She died in 1973.

Further Reading

For the facts of Bowen's life, some sources are her own Bowen's Court (1942; 2d ed. 1964), about the Bowen family, and Seven Winters (1942), covering her childhood; and her chapter in John Lehmann, ed., Coming to London (1957), which gives her view of literary life in London in the early 1920s. For a detailed study of her novels, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives, St. Martin's Press, 1995; or Renee C. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing New York University Press, 1994, are useful. For information on her short stories, read Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of Short Fiction, Macmillan Publishing, 1991.

Bowen, Elizabeth [Dorothea Cole] (1899-1973), writer of fiction; born in Dublin into an Anglo-Irish family. The first years of her life were divided between Dublin, where her father was a barrister, and Bowen's Court in Co. Cork. The history of the family was recounted in Bowen's Court (1942). In 1921, after a brief spell as an art student in London, she became engaged to a lieutenant, but she did not marry him. Her first two novels, The Hotel (1927) and The Last September (1929), portray romantic engagements. In 1923, she published Encounters, a collection of stories, and married Alan Cameron. The stories collected in Ann Lee's (1926) and Joining Charles (1929) were followed by Friends and Relations (1931), a novel dealing with English middle-class life, and To the North (1932), which explores passions underlying the social façade. The Cat Jumps (1934), Look at all Those Roses (1941), and The Demon Lover (1945), contain short stories, a form which she felt allowed for extremes of experience. The effects of a disrupted upbringing explored in the novel The House in Paris (1935), are more profoundly developed in The Death of the Heart (1938). The Heat of the Day (1949) draws on her experience in London during the war. Three more novels were published: A World of Love (1955), set in Ireland; The Little Girls (1964), dealing with the reopening of relationships; and the grotesque Eva Trout (1969). A volume of stories, A Day in the Dark, appeared in 1965. Bowen spent the last years of her life in Hythe, Kent. Her distinctive, highly wrought style, deals with innocence, betrayal, and the fears beneath the veneer of respectability.

Bibliography

Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (1981).

Quotes:

"It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home."

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved."

"Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities."

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."

See more famous quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.

Contents 1 Life 2 Assessment 3 Selected works 4 External links 5 References

Life

Elixabeth Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Bowen’s Court in County Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. 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 Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, 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 BBC. The marriage has been described as "a sexless but contented union" ^[1]. 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 Seán Ó Faoláin and at least one lesbian entanglement, with the American poet, May Sarton ^[2].

Bowen inherited Bowen's Court in 1930, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality ^[3].

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 Prize for Eva Trout as well as Doctorates in Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (1949) and the University of Oxford (1952). She was also awarded the CBE.

After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of cancer 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 film 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 (1929)
• Friends and Relations ( 1931)
• To the North (1932)
• The House in Paris (1935)
• The Death of the Heart (1939)
• The Heat of the Day (1949)
• A World of Love (1955)
• The Little Girls (1964)
• The Good Tiger (1965)
• Eva Trout (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)
• Look At All Those Roses (1941)
• The Demon Lover 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: Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977)

Critical Studies

• Hermione Lee: 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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Elizabeth Bowen

• Elizabeth Bowen at Irish Writers Online
• Elizabeth Bowen at the Princess Grace Irish Library
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Elizabeth Bowen's London in The Heat of the Day: An Impression of the City in the Territory of War by Céline Magot
• Elizabeth Bowen and her Headington home
• Elizabeth Bowen MySpace
• Archival material relating to Elizabeth Bowen listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Elizabeth Bowen Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

References

1. ^ Book Review by Mary Morrisy, The Irish Times Weekend Review, page 13, 31 January 2009
2. ^ Irish Times, op cit
3. ^ See Notes On Éire: Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill by Elizabeth Bowen. (2nd Edition). Aubane Historical Society, (2008), Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return by Neil Corcoran, Oxford University Press, (2004), and That Neutral Island by Clair Wills, Faber and Faber, (2007).

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