The great dame of modern romance
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was one of the most important Irish-British novelists and short story writers of the 20th century, the only daughter of Henry Charles Cole Bowen and Florence Colley Bowen, a Protestant couple from the gentry. She employed a meticulously crafted prose style, often detailing difficult and unsatisfactory relationships that focused on life in wartime London and relationships among the upper middle class. The Death of the Heart (1938), the title of one of her most praised novels, may have served for most of these relationships.
Termed by some as the “great dame” of the modern novel, her writing had a self-conscious, concise style that reflects her keen interest in “life with the lid on and what happens when the lid is taken off.” Examines the innocence of ordered life and the irrepressible forces that transform one's experience. In her novels, she investigates betrayal and secrets beneath the veneer of respectability.
Bowen was born into Anglo-Irish gentry and spent her early childhood in Dublin, as recounted in her autobiographical fragment Seven Winters (1942), and in the family home she later inherited in Kildorrery, County Cork, near the Great Channel.
She listened to the rumble of trams on the bridges and watched the passing of boats transporting wood to a nearby sawmill. The story of the house is told in Bowen’s Court (1942), and is the setting for his novel The Last September (1929), which takes place during the events leading up to Irish independence. Among her childhood friends were artists Mainie Jellett and Sylvia Cooke-Collis.
In her memoir, she recalls the sights and sounds of that life in Dublin. From an early age he was aware of social distinctions derived from religion and social class. Catholic workers were part of the city's population but were recognized as “the others.” Their worlds were close, but they never touched.
She spent her childhood summers at Bowen's Court in County Cork and winters at the family home in Herbert Place in Dublin. Her family life was interrupted when, in 1905, her father suffered a nervous breakdown and she and her mother moved to the Kent coast in England. Her father recovered in 1912, but Mrs. Florence received the news that she had cancer, and, after an operation, she was told she had six months to live. “I have good news, now I'm going to see what heaven is like", she said to a sister-in-law. In less than six months she died, at the end of September 1912.
Deeply saddened, Elizabeth went to live with her aunts, her guardians, at Harpenden Hall, Hertfordshire. They sent her to Downe House School, a selective boarding school for girls, and the LCC School of Art in London. After abandoning her studies, she spent some time traveling around Italy.
In 1923 Bowen married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who worked for Northamptonshire County Council, then Oxford and later the BBC. Described as a “sexless but happy union,” the marriage was never consummated. Bowen had several affairs throughout her married life, most notably with writers Humphry House, Sean O'Faolain and Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, seven years her junior, for over thirty years. In 1925, the couple went to live in Oxford.
Bowen became associated with the Bloomsbury Group, which included, among others, the English scholar Maurice Bowra, the writers T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Graham Greene, Rosamund Lehmann, John Buchan, Susan Buchan and Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for his first book, Encounters (1923), a collection of short stories.
Upon her father's death in 1930, Elizabeth Bowen inherited Bowen's Court, the imposing country house built in 1775 in the Irish county of Cork. For generations, members of the Bowen family, sole owners of the property, spent idyllic summers in their rooms. For her, remembering Bowen's Court was returning to her native Ireland, and she did so in several of her books, such as The Last September (1929), Seven Winters (1942) and the biographical essay Bowen's Court from 1942.
In 1931, Bowen began reviewing for the British political magazine The New Statesman and the British magazine The Tatler. She published two novels in quick succession, Friends and Relationships (1931) and To the North (1932).
During the Second World War, her husband joined the Home Guard and Elizabeth worked as director of ARP - Air Raid Precaution, in London and provided reports to the British government on Ireland's neutrality. The war brought her into contact with people she would rarely meet, producing an effect she described as "the thinning of the membrane between this and that." The result was The Heat of the Day. Published in 1949, the book became the classic novel of London during the war years.
Now recognized as a great novelist, Bowen was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1948, and Alan began to take over her affairs. Over the next two years she went on speaking tours abroad for the British Council and was invited, along with Dame Florence Hancock, to join the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, which ran from 1949 to 1953. .
The committee was in favor of abolishing the death penalty in the United Kingdom. The Report was published in September 1953; but it did not lead to any changes in legislation. The United Kingdom only abolished the death penalty on October 1, 1998. The last two executions were in 1964. The death penalty was still provided for in two situations: high treason and piracy with violence.
After the war ended, she traveled extensively, spending extended periods in America, working for the British Council or teaching at various universities. In 1948, she was made a Companion of the British Empire and received honorary doctorates from Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford.
Her novel The Heat of the Day (1949), set in London during the war, is one of her most significant works. The war also formed the basis for one of her short story collections, The Demon Lover (1945; US title Ivy Gripped the Steps). Her essays appear in Collected Impressions (1950) and Afterthought (1962).
In 1952, the couple began spending more time at Bowen's Court. Alan, who had suffered an eye injury in the First World War, was now losing sight in his good eye and had to resign from his job at the BBC. He died on August 26, 1952. Bowen would later write to his American publisher Alfred Knopf and his wife Blanche Knopf about her husband's death:
"I felt maimed when Alan died, after twenty-nine years together. That's the last thing he would have wanted me to feel; so, I suppose it was partly because of him that I've tried to live my life well ever since."
As Alan's pension was insufficient to pay her expenses, she worked hard, writing for magazines, especially the American ones that paid well. But in 1959, unable to survive financially, she was forced to sell Bowen’s Court. The house was demolished the following year. Elizabeth returned to England and in 1965 bought a house in Hythe, Kent, where her mother had died.
From 1952 until her death, she lived a nomadic existence. She spent a lot of time in America, where she befriended Eudora Welty and taught at several universities. Popular among students, she was a writer-in-residence at Vassar, as well as at the American Academy in Rome, and was a fellow at Bryn Mawr, located in the US state of Pennsylvania, in Montgomery County. But Bowen considered herself an intuitive writer, not an intellectual:
"I'm only fully intelligent when I write. I have a certain amount of intelligence of minor changes, which I carry with me, at least in a city, you need to carry little money, for the needs of the day, the day you do not write. But it seems me that I rarely think purely... if I thought more, I would write less.”
Literary career
At twenty, she moved to an aunt's house in London. Olive Willis, the boarding school director, knew the author Rose Macaulay, and the connection led to an invitation to tea. Meeting Macaulay “awakened a confidence I never had,” Bowen wrote. She was introduced to Naomi Royde-Smith, then editor of Saturday Westminster, where she had her first story published.
With a little money that allowed her to live independently in London and spend the winter in Italy, Bowen began writing short stories. Her first collection, Encounters, was published in 1923. It was followed by The Hotel in 1927, a typical book that tells the story of a young woman trying to deal with a life she is not prepared for.
The Last September (1929) is an autumnal image of the Anglo-Irish gentry. The House in Paris, 1935, another highly praised novel by Bowen, is a story of love and betrayal told, in part, through the eyes of two children. Over the next two years she wrote two books, a collection of stories titled Ann Lee's and her first novel The Hotel, published by Constable in 1926.
"I was now considered the mistress of a house; and the sensation of living anywhere, besides making a succession of visits, was new to me."
After signing with an agent, she sold stories to magazines in England and the United States. Her first fictions dealt with repressed characters who, in her words, lived "a closed life". Her camera was always turning to the side. She once wrote:
"Human unknowable. ... Stories are questions asked: many end with a shrug, a question, or, for the reader, a kind of exaggeration."
Her career spanned several decades until the late 1960s. Her novels and short stories continued to attract readers and critics after her death. A crucial figure in 20th-century fiction writing, Bowen was a commercial success as a writer and attracted the interest and attention of academic critics.
The inability to clearly place her works within twentieth-century writing has become more recognized and celebrated in critical studies since the early 1990s, a fact now seen as one of the most interesting aspects of her works. Her books continued to be printed after her death. Some of her novels and stories have been adapted for radio, television, and film.
Characteristics of your writing
Bowen experimented with various literary styles and forms and tested language beyond the limits of conventional construction and acceptable syntax, which reflects his admiration for these highly modernist writers. However, her best writing dramatizes the conflicts between literary forms, and her great gift lies in her ability to transform bizarreness into fiction.
Bowen's most characteristic feature as a novelist is her incredible ability to represent dispossession (the act or effect of taking away someone's possession), separation and lack of belonging, the perception of someone being part of a community, a family, of a group and a nation.
The imaginative settings are firmly embedded in the world of English upper-middle class and Anglo-Irish ancestry. The themes and preoccupations of her imagination are distinct: the fragility of personal identity, the fracture of external perception, the inconstancies of adolescence, the comedy of social class and exchange, the diffuse nature of sexuality, and the varied possibilities of erotic individuality.
In her writings, she demonstrates a keen interest in the mysterious nature of perception through her advanced visual sense and her interest in social interaction. Although linked to high modernism, as shown by her interest in Woolf, Proust, and Joyce, she adhered, in all her last two novels, to the narrative techniques of classical realism.
The wealthy life did not prevent Bowen's literature from coming closer to the reality of war and poverty that ravaged London, as happens in The Heat of the Day (1949), where he tells a love story with war as its background. She had the ability to take readers into the most complex regions of the heart, but also to vividly portray the most traumatic consequences of war.
It ventured into the ruins and focused on its less visible protagonists, such as children with fragmented childhoods and complex emotional worlds, misunderstood and underestimated by adults who can barely cope with their own lives.
Literary works
The Death of the Heart, a novel published in 1938, is her masterpiece, considered by Time magazine as one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century and demonstrates her debt to Henry James in her careful observation of details. and in the theme of innocence obscured by experience.
Set in London between the wars, it tells the story of Portia, an orphaned teenager who goes to live with her half-brother and his wife in a dark and noble mansion located in the same neighborhood where the author lived. Between tea rituals, egg sandwiches and centuries-old furniture, Bowen reveals the most intimate particularities of British high society, full of secrets and affectations.
Life passes slowly and without sentimentality inside homes where almost nothing is expressed with words, but with silences, subtle gestures, and rigid social mandates. Her writing flows slowly, carefully, and elegantly, becoming a constant reminder of how each of her books has been approached with meticulous industry over the years.
It is considered the best depiction of London during the bombings of the Second World War, for its deft portrayal of a teenage girl's tempestuous inner life. Its three sections – The World, The Flesh, and The Devil – refer to the baptismal rite in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
Bowen’s last book, Pictures and Conversations (1975) is an introspective and partly autobiographical collection of essays and articles. Published in 2009, Civil War of Love: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941–1973, edited by Victoria Glendinning, is a record of the Bowen's long affair with the Canadian diplomat. The work features her letters and his diaries and provides insight into her sometimes tumultuous personal life.
The author preferred to write in the morning, when she was “cold, energetic, sincere and rational,” rather than at night, when her brain worked “fast, but feverishly and with worse quality.” When she worked on a novel, she kept “office hours” strictly within standard business hours.
Awards and honors
1948 - for her contribution to literature, she was awarded the MEOBE – Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
1969 - Eva Trout (1968), her last novel about a young woman raised by her millionaire father, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the oldest and most prestigious prizes in the English language.
1977 – The first biography of Elizabeth Bowen by Victoria Glendinning is published.
2009 - Victoria Glendinning published a book focusing on the relationship between Charles Ritchie and Elizabeth Bowen, based on letters and diaries.
2014 - English Heritage marked Bowen’s Regent’s Park house on Clarence Terrace with a blue plaque. The plaque was unveiled on 19 October 2014 to commemorate her residence at the Coach House, The Croft, Headington, from 1925 to 1935.
Bibliography of Elizabeth Bowen
Affairs
The Hotel (1927)
The Last September (1929)
Friends and Relationships (1931)
To the North (1932)
The House in Paris (1935)
The Death of the Heart (1938)
The Heat of the Day (1949)
A World of Love (1955)
The Little Girls (1964)
Eva Trout (1968)
Stories and collections
Encounters (1923)
Ann Lee's and Other Stories (1926)
Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929)
The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934)
Look at All Those Roses (1941)
The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)
Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (1946)
Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (1959)
A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965)
The Good Tiger (1965, children's book) - illustrated by M. Nebel (1965 edition) and Quentin Blake (1970 edition)
Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories (1978)
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1980)
The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) - edited by Allan Hepburn
Nonfiction
Bowen's Court (1942, 1964)
Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942)
English Novelists (1942)
Anthony Trollope: A New Judgment (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), edited by Spencer Curtis Brown
The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (1999), edited by Hermione Lee
"Notes on Éire": Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill by Elizabeth Bowen, 1940–1942 (2008), edited by Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford.
People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2008) - edited by Allan Hepburn
Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries, 1941–1973 (2009), edited by Victoria Glendinning and Judith Robertson.
Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (2010), edited by Allan Hepburn.
Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish Writings (2011), edited by Éibhear Walshe
The Weight of a World of Feeling: Reviews and Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2016), edited by Allan Hepburn.
Television and film adaptations
The House in Paris (BBC, 1959), starring Pamela Brown, Trader Faulkner, Clare Austin, and Vivienne Bennett.
The Death of the Heart (1987), starring Patricia Hodge, Nigel Havers, Robert Hardy, Phyllis Calvert, Wendy Hiller, and Miranda Richardson.
The Heat of the Day (Granada Television, 1989) starring Patricia Hodge, Michael Gambon, Michael York, Peggy Ashcroft, and Imelda Staunton.
The Last September (1999), starring Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Fiona Shaw, Jane Birkin, Lambert Wilson, David Tennant, Richard Roxburgh, and Keeley Hawes.
Biographies and critical studies
Elizabeth Bowen: a biography of Victoria Glendinning (2006).
Civil War of Love: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie – Letters and Diaries 1941-1973, edited by Victoria Glendinning and Judith Robertson (2009).
Elizabeth Bowen: a literary life by Patricia Laurence (2019).
Last years
In 1962, she sublet a flat in Oxford. A year later, The Little Girls was published, and she bought a small house in Hythe, on the Kent coast, where she had lived years before with her mother.
"I suppose I like Hythe for being back in the womb, for having been there as a child, in the most fun years of someone's childhood - from ages 8 to 13. But I can't see what's wrong with the womb if someone is happy there, or comparatively happy there."
In 1969, Elizabeth Bowen published her autobiography Pictures and Conversations. In early 1972, she spent Christmas with her friends in Kinsale, County Cork. She lost her voice and was hospitalized shortly after returning home and diagnosed with lung cancer.
She died on the morning of February 22, 1973, at University College Hospital. She was buried next to her husband in Farahy, Cork County Cemetery, near the gates of Bowen’s Court. At the entrance to St Colman's Church there is a memorial plaque bearing the words of John Sparrow, where an annual commemoration of her memory is held. The great lady of modern romance left a literary legacy that arouses increasing interest in the literary world.
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