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
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...
death Charles Darwin
CD , naturalist, died at his estate of Downe in Kent, which became a girls' boarding-school in 1907 and is now a museum.
Elizabeth Bowen , who was a girl at the school, was...
Dedications Susan Tweedsmuir
ST published the third of her own novels, The Rainbow through the Rain, which she dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen .
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
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
Dedications Eudora Welty
EW 's next collected volume, containing seven pieces, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, was dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen .
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
New York Times. New York Times Company.
4
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
667
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...
Education Stella Gibbons
Writers Elizabeth Bowen and Christina Hole enrolled in this course at roughly the same time as SG .
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998.
33
Family and Intimate relationships Rosamond Lehmann
In the early stages of the turmoil which the Spanish Civil War brought into her life, RL met and fell in love with Welsh writer Goronwy Rees at the home of Elizabeth Bowen , who...
Family and Intimate relationships Rosamond Lehmann
RL originally met Day-Lewis at Elizabeth Bowen 's home in London in 1936. Their next meeting followed on her reviewing his Poems in Wartime, 1940, for the New Statesman. She called him a...
Family and Intimate relationships Iris Murdoch
Bayley (who was six years younger than Murdoch) appeared to her as an escape from her painful, dominated relationship with Elias Canetti .
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins, 2002.
374
He later held one of Oxford's few Chairs as Thomas Warton...
Friends, Associates Julia O'Faolain
Living in different countries, JOF moved in different literary circles, not all Irish or English. In Florence she and her husband were welcomed into the circle of the cosmopolitan writer Violet Trefusis at Villa dell'Ombrellino...
Friends, Associates Rose Macaulay
In 1921 RM was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington.
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
In her day EJ knew most of the London literary world. She met Agatha Christie , whom she described as the most elegantly dressed elderly woman I have ever seen.
qtd. in
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
148
She counted among her...
Friends, Associates Susan Tweedsmuir
ST made her own the friendship with Elizabeth Robins that had begun because Robins was a friend of her mother's. She was also close to playwright-producer Harley Granville-Barker and particularly to his second wife, the...
Friends, Associates Lady Cynthia Asquith
Cynthia was also a friend of Viola Meynell and of Enid Bagnold , whose Sussex homes were close to that of the Asquiths during the Second World War. Thirkell, as well as Lawrence, Bagnold, and...

Timeline

1907: Educationalist Olive Willis founded a school...

Building item

1907

Educationalist Olive Willis founded a school for girls at Downe House in Kent, formerly occupied by Charles Darwin . Downe House School began with one pupil, five teachers, and no financial backing.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, 2004, p. 240 pp.
179

26 April 1916: Pacifist writer (and Republican sympathiser)...

National or international item

26 April 1916

Pacifist writer (and Republican sympathiser) Francis Sheehy Skeffington was executed with two others in Dublin by order of a British army captain, J. C. Bowen-Colthurst .
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
44-5
John Bowen-Colthurst was a cousin of Elizabeth Bowen

: The second number of Orion. A Miscellany...

Writing climate item

Autumn 1945

The second number of Orion. A Miscellany appeared: Rosamond Lehmann was one of the editors, along with C. Day Lewis and Edwin Muir .
British Book News. British Council.
(1946): 308

March 1949: Elizabeth Bowen's feature on 1918 was broadcast...

Women writers item

March 1949

Elizabeth Bowen 's feature on 1918 was broadcast on the BBC 's Third Programme series A Year I Remember.
Whitehead, Kate. The Third Programme: A Literary History. Clarendon Press, 1989, http://UofA Rutherford North.
131-2

9 December 2006-17 July 2007: The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted...

Writing climate item

9 December 2006-17 July 2007

The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of photographs of women writers, mostly novelists, from 1920 to 1960.
“Women writers through the lens”. Mslexia, No. 33, Apr. 2007, p. 7.
7

Texts

Bowen, Elizabeth. A Day in the Dark and Other Stories. Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, Elizabeth. A Time in Rome. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowen, Elizabeth. A World of Love. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Afterthought: Pieces about Writing. Longmans, 1962.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Ann Lee’s and Other Stories. Sidgwick and Jackson.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement. Oxford University Press, 1946.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Bowen’s Court. Longmans, Green.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Impressions. Longmans, Green.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Encounters. Sidgwick and Jackson.
Bowen, Elizabeth. English Novelists. William Collins, 1942.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes. Alfred A. Knopf.
Brown, Spencer Curtis, and Elizabeth Bowen. “Foreword”. Pictures and Conversations, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, p. vii - xlii.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Friends and Relations. Constable and Company.
Wilson, Angus, and Elizabeth Bowen. “Introduction”. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, pp. 7-11.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Irish Stories. Poolbeg Press.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Joining Charles and Other Stories. Constable and Company.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Look at All Those Roses. Victor Gollancz.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Nativity Play: A Christmas Musical. Dramatic Publishing Company, 1974.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “Notes on Writing a Novel”. Orion: A Miscellany, edited by Rosamond Lehmann et al., Nicholson and Watson, 1945.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Pictures and Conversations. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Selected Stories. Maurice Fridberg, 1946.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Seven Winters. The Cuala Press, 1942.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Art of Bergotte”. Marcel Proust, 1871-1922: A Centenary Volume, edited by Peter Quennell, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Cat Jumps and Other Stories. Victor Gollancz.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf.