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Life
| [Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen;] b. 7 June 1899, 15 Herbert Place, Dublin; only child of dg. Henry Cole Bowen of Bowen’s Court (Farahy, nr. Kildorrery [Cill Dairbhre], N. Co. Cork) and Florence [née Florence Isabella Pomeroy Colley] of Mount Temple, Clontarf (m. 1890); her father (BL, TCD), a victim of anxiety with a history of bad relations with his own father, who suffered a mental breakdown and entered a home [asylum] in 1907; | ||
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| Elizabeth removed to England by her mother at seven (viz., ‘seven winters’), on the advice of her father’s doctor, 1907, living variously at Folkestone, Hythe (Erin Cottage), Lyminge (Erin Cottage), Seabrook; learns to read only at 7, on her mother’s theory of not straining her brain; ed. Lindum [primary school], Folkestone; interim of lessons with children of the vicar (Salmon); forms friendship with cousin Audrey Fiennes; recovery of her father, who resumes work as Land Purchase lawyer in Dublin, c.1910; visits Bowen’s Court, summer 1912; suffers death of her mother, from cancer, at Hythe, following several operations, Sept. 1912 (EB aetat. 13); | ||
| placed in charge of Laura Colley, whose br. was curate at St. John’s, Harpenden, Herts.; enrolled in Harpenden Hall as day-girl, Sept. 1912, being visited by her father there during holidays; travels to Cologne and Switzerland with her father and her guardians, 1913;becomes a boarder at Downe House School, Kent, Sept. 1914 (scene of ‘the mulberry tree’ where secrets were shared); enrolls in Central School for Arts and Crafts (Southampton Row), London, and stays two terms; participates in Bloomsbury society; stayed at Bowen’s Court with Henry and Aunt Sarah [Bowen, of Mitchelstown], summer 1916; contribs. story to Saturday Westminster; introduced to Rose Macaulay by her Downe House headmistress, and helped by her to find a publisher for a first story-collection, Encounters (1923); | ||
| through Audrey’s mother [Mrs. Fiennes] meets Alan Charles Cameron (1893-1952), an ex-military Scottish educationalist and broadcaster, afterwards Sec. of Education to City of Oxford, 1923; m. Cameron, 4 Aug. 1923, settling at [Waldencote] Old Headington, Oxfordshire, afterwards becoming a solely companionate relationship; friends incl. the Buchans [son of Lord Tweedsmuir], Lord David Cecil, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra and Isiah Berlin - a life-long friend; issues Ann Lee’s and Other Stories (1927); contrib. to Lady Cynthia Asquith, ed., The Funny Bone (1928); issues The Hotel (1927), a novel set on the Italian Riviera and concerning Sydney Warren, a young woman who makes the wrong decision and breaks off her engagement; issued The Last September (1929) - ‘of all my books ... nearest my heart’ - set in 1920 and centred on the character of Lois Farquar, torn between her own class and her sympathy for her Catholic neighbours the Conners, and ending when Danielstown House is burned down, its door standing ‘open hospitably upon a furnace’; Henry Bowen retires from bar, 1928; | ||
| enjoys increasing celebrity in London and Oxford; issues Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929); Henry falls ill, relapses into mental sickness, and dies May 1930; EB inherits Bowen’s Court, Co. Cork, 1930 [aetat. 31], hosting many parties there, with Virgnia Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Rosamund Lehmann, Cyril Connolly and O’Faolain, and among the guests; clandestine love affair with Humphrey House (lecturer at Wadham Coll., Oxon.), then engaged and afterwards married; issues Friends and Relations (1931), a tale of marital confusions containing the adolescent horror, and later lesbian, Theodora Thirdman, an early example of the troubled child in her fiction; issues To the North (1932), the narrative of young Emmeline Summers’ doomed encounter with Markie, a barrister whom her sister-in-law Cecilia meets on a train, and featuring the interfering Lady Waters; issues The Cat Jumps (1934); contribs. reviews to New Statesman, Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, Observer, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Tatler, et al.; Humphry House visited Bowen’s Court in 1935 shortly prior to a move to Calcutta with his family; | ||
| issues The House in Paris (1935), dealing with an affair between two people, Karen and Max, who are each engaged to others, revealed during the sojourn of two displaced children, Leopold and Henrietta, the products of those confused relationships; Cameron appt. Sec. of Central Council of School Broadcasting (BBC), 1935; moves with him to 2 Clarence Tce., Regent’s Park, London; engaged in literary work in London, unavoidably refusing an invitation from Virginia Woolf, now a friend and correspondent (though occasionally perturbed by Elizabeth’s non-communication); moots love affair with a younger man, Goronwy Rees (ass. ed. at Spectator), who became engaged to Rosalind Lehmann at a hunt ball held at Bowen’s Court, Dec. 1936; ED attends Salzburg Fest., spring 1937; encounters Seán O’Faolain - who was coincidentally in Salzburg also - in Dublin, 1938, and embarks on a brief affair; ed. Faber Book of Modern Stories (1937), describing the ‘new literature’ as ‘an affair of reflexes, of immediate susceptibility’ and never apt to ‘attempt a synthesis’; | ||
| elected to MIAL, 1937; issued The Death of the Heart (1938), tracing the disillusionment of sixteen-year old Portia amid her London bemused relatives but chiefly at the hands of a ‘cad’ who disastrously fills the vacuum in her life; takes O’Faolain to meet Virginia Woolf at Tavistock Sq., 8 Feb.1939 (‘I wouldn’t ask if he were not so very nice’); gets Bowen’s Court wired for electricity, 1939 - this and other matters on the estate managed by Jim Gates a second-generation ‘local’ associated with the family; EB serves as an air warden [ARP] in 1939; volunteers for work with Ministry of Information and and writes confidential reports as “Mrs Cameron” on state of opinion in Ireland, travelling between London, Dublin and Bowen’s Court, while occupying a flat on St. Stephen’s Green; quotes views of Frank Gallagher, George O’Brien et al., while conveying her own toleration of Irish neutrality; contribs. “The Big House” to The Bell (Ist iss.; 1940), a plea for reconciliation the Irish and the Anglo-Irish traditions; | ||
| speaks of the ‘failure of the ‘thirties generation to achieve greatness in its poems, plays and novels in “The Leaning Tower”, a paper given to the Workers’ Education Assoc., May 1940; visits Woolfs at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex (following the bombing of ; contribs. ‘Eire’, a distillation of her reports, to New Statesman and Nation (21 April 1941); meets and forms lasting friendship with Charles Ritchie [aetat. 35], a Canadian diplomat from Nova Scotia, 1941 - with whom she maintained close contact for thirty years, enabled by ‘compassionate’ marriages on either side; issued Look at All Those Roses (1941); issues Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942), initially with Cuala Press, and Bowen’s Court (1942), with Longmans, having been rejected by Jonathan Lane as ‘subversive’; undergoes unsuccessful treatment for stammer, 1942; issues English Novelists (1942); issues The Demon Lover (1945), a tale of the supernatural, with other stories; Clarence Tce. damaged by German V2 bomb, and vacated for repairs, July-Oct. 1944; expresses alienation from ‘Labour wets’ of post-war Britain, Sep. 1945 (letter to Wm. Plomer); contracts jaundice, 1945-Feb. 1946; reads Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” incessantly in bed; | ||
| Ritchie departs for Canada, early 1945, briefly returning to London in 1949; Bowen writes, with John Perry Castle Anna, a play (Lyric Hammersmith, 1946); commences broadcasting with BBC, 1946; awarded CBE 1948; serves as acting principal at summer-school for teachers, Kent Folkestone; Ritchie marries his second cousin Sylvia, largely for career reasons 1948; Bowen undertakes lecture tours in Czechoslovakia and Austria for British Council, 1948-50; dines with Greene in Vienna night-club where he arranges a police raid to amuse her (acc. to himself in A Sort of Life); issues The Heat of the Day (1949), a wartime novel commenced in 1944, concerning Stella Rodney’s affair with Robert Kelway, a man revealed to be spying for the Nazis by a British agent who propositions her as the price of his freedom; joins Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett in Why Do I Write? (1948), a set of epistolary exchanges; profits from this novel enabled her to install bathrooms in Bowen’s Court; invested Commander, Order of the British Empire (CBE), 1948; served on Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949-53, resulting in Abolition, 1953; received Hon. DLitt., TCD, 1949; Earliest Stories (new edn., NY Knopf 1949); issued Collected Impressions (1950); moved to Bowenscourt in 1951; EB becomes god-mother to the Spenders’ dg. Elizabeth; | ||
| Cameron suffers heart attack, 1951 - having semi-retired some time earlier with eye-trouble stemming from WWI gas attack; moves out of Clarence Tce., the lease passing to Louis MacNeice; returned with furniture to Bowen’s Court, after Christmas 1951, spending the first night in a Fermoy hotel; her style parodied in an issue of New Yorker, 1952; Alan Cameron d., 26 Aug. 1952; Veronica Wedgewood stays as guest at Bowen’s Court, winter 1953; EB visits Rome, and invites John Lehmann to Bowen’s Court [1954]; serves with others on editorial board of his London Magazine; writer in residence, American Academy, Rome, 1955; issues A World of Love (1955), an Irish novel centred on Jane Danby, a dg. of the big house, coming to terms with the changing reality of contemporary Ireland; holds Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship, Bryn Mawr, 1956; forms friendship with Iris Murdoch; receives DLitt (Oxon.), 1956 [vars. 1952, 1959]; sold Bowen’s Court to Cornelius O’Keefe, a farming neighbour, on the misapprehension that he would make it a family home, 1959; roof removed and house demolished, 1960 (‘It was a clean end. Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin’); moves into a flat in a house of Isaiah Berlin at Old Headington; wrote script for a 60-min. programme on Ireland in an American TV series, ‘The Twentieth Century”, produced by Isaac Kleinerman; | ||
| issues A Time in Rome (1960); issues Afterthought (1962) and The Little Girls (1964); moved into modern house which she called “Carbery” at Hythe, Kent, always keeping a room ready for Ritchie, 1965; issued A Day in the Dark (1965) and Eva Trout (US 1968) - of which A. N. Wilson wrote, ‘The book shimmers with life in every paragraph’, concerning the life and death of the title-character, a disturbed orphan and heiress who acquires a ‘son’ in America, and eventually dies by gunshot at his hand; issued The Good Tiger (1970), for children; suffered acute bronchitis, an effect of smoking; radium treatment, 1972; acted as Booker Prize judge from hospital; visited Ireland, Christmas 1972; returned to Hythe and d. in hospital, of lung cancer, 22 Feb. 1973; bur. with her husband Alan Cameron, in Farahy churchyard, obit. by Francis King - erroneously making Robert a Communist rather than a Fascist spy in Heat of the Day); Pictures and Conversations (1974), autobiographical sketches, appeared posthum. on her instructions; her agent Spencer Curtis Brown became her literary executor; her papers held at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Texas U., Austin); see seemingly commissioned a portrait by Patrick Hennessy, whom she met at Fairyfield, the Kinsale summer home of Major Stephen and Lady Ursula Vernon. NCBE OCEL DIL DIW DIB KUN ATT FDA OCIL | ||
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| Photo-portrait by Cecil Beaton | Portrait by Patrick Hennessy (Crawford, Cork) |
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Bibliographical details
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, intro. by Angus Wilson (NY: Knopf 1981), 784pp. FIRST STORIES: “Breakfast”; “Daffodils”; “The Return”; “The Confidante”; “Requiescat”; “All Saints”; “The New House”; “Lunch”; “The Lover”; “Mrs Windermere”; “The Shadowy Third”; “The Evil That Men Do -”; “Sunday Evening”; “Coming Home.” The Twenties: “Ann Lee’s”; “The Parrot”; “The Visitor”; “The Contessina”; “Human Habitation”; “The Secession”; “Making Arrangements”; “The Storm”; “Charity”; “The Back Drawing-Room”; “Recent Photograph”; “Joining Charles”; “The Jungle”; “Shores: An International Episode”; “The Dancing-Mistress”; “Aunt Tatty”; “Dead Mabelle”; “The Working Party”; “Foothold”; “The Cassowary”; “Telling”; “Mrs. Moysey”. THE THIRTIES: “The Tommy Crans”; “The Good Girl”; “The Cat Jumps”; “The Last Night in the Old Home”; “The Disinherited”; “Maria”; “Her Table Spread”; “The Little Girl’s Room”; “Firelight in the Flat”; “The Man of the Family …”; “The Needlecase”; “The Apple Tree”; “Reduced”; “Tears, Idle Tears”; “A Walk in the Woods”; “A Love Story”; “Look at All Those Roses”; “Attractive Modern Homes”; “The Easter Egg Party”; “Love”; “No. 16”; “A Queer Heart”; “The Girl with the Stoop”. THE WAR YEARS: “Unwelcome Idea”; “Oh, Madam …”; “Summer Night”; “In the Square”; “Sunday Afternoon”; “The Inherited Clock”; “The Cheery Soul”; “Songs My Father Sang Me”; “The Demon Lover”; “Careless Talk”; “The Happy Autumn Fields”; “Ivy Gripped the Steps”; “Pink May”; “Green Holly”; “Mysterious Kôr”; “The Dolt’s Tale.” POSTWAR STORIES: “I Hear You Say So”; “Gone Away”; “Hand in Glove”; “A Day in the Dark”.See also Ian D’Alton, ‘“My name is Alan Charles Cameron ...”: The Farahy Address, 9 September 2007’, in The Irish Review, Nos. 40-41 (Winter 2009), pp.171-76.
Photo by Slim Aarons (1962)
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Bibliographical details
Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction (NY: Twayne 1991), 192pp. CONTENTS. Preface [x]; Acknowledgments [xvi]; 1: THE SHORT FICTION - Introduction [3]; The Ghostly Origins of Female Character [10]; Comedies of Sex and Manners [25]; Children’s “Disconcerting Questions” [41]; Comedies of Sex and Terror [54]; Elegies of Loss and Dispossession [75]; Three Masterworks [97]; Notes to Part 1 [111]. 2: THE WRITER - Introduction [119]; From “The Experience of Writing” [122]; From the Preface to The Faber Book of Modern Short Stones [123]; From a Review of Gorki Stories [127]; From the Preface to Ann Lee’s and Other Stories [128]; Preface to The Demon Lover [131]; From the Preface to The Second Ghost Book [137]; “The Short Story in England” [138]; From “The Forgotten Art of Living” [144]; From “Sources of Influence” [145]; From Bowen’s Court [148]. 3: THE CRITICS - Introduction [157]; William Trevor [168]; Eudora Welty [173]; Chronology [181]; Selected Bibliography [183]; Index [189].Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1995), 181pp. CHAPS.: Foreword; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Abeyances: The Hotel and The Last September; Shivered: To the North and Friends and Relations; Fanatic Immobility: The House in Paris; Dream Wood: The Death of the Heart; Sheer Kink: The Heat of the Day; Obelisk: A World of Love; Trance: The Little Girls; Convulsions: Eva Trout; Index.
Susan Osborn [Rutgers U.], ed., Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork UP 2009), 256pp. CONTENTS. 1. Sinéad Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian Affinities’; 2. Osborn, ‘How to Measure this Unaccountable Darkness Between the Trees: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in The Last September’; 3. Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart’; 4. June Sturrock, ‘Mumbo-jumbo: The Haunted World of The Little Girls’; 5. Shannon Wells-Lassagne, ‘She-ward Bound: Elizabeth Bowen as a Sensationalist Writer’; 6. Shafquat Towheed, ‘Territory, Space, Modernity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and Wartime London’; 7. Brook Miller, with Luke Elward, Tessa Hempel & Philip Kollar, ‘Narrative, Meaning and Agency in The Heat of the Day’. Bibliography, pp.159-66.
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Commentary
See infra.
Quotations
See infra.
References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Last September (1929), 312pp. [Black and Tan period from big house standpoint, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor of Danielstown House, Co. Tipperary [err.], and dg. [recte niece] Lois [Farquar] who thinks herself in love with young British garrison officer later killed by the IRA; psychological interest (‘unfortunately people of little interest or importance’, acc. Clarke)]; A World of Love (Jonathan Cape 1955), 244pp. [middle class family on farm in Co. Limerick; parents, and dgs. Jane, 20, and Lilia, 12]; and lists The Heat of the Day, Eva Trout, A Summer’s Night, and Bowen’s Court.
[There is an ample Wikipedia page - online; accessed 21.09.2017.]
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3 selects “The Happy Autumn Fields”, from The Demon Lover and Other Stories [939-48]; The Last September [1167]. Bowen is quoted as showing that in Anglo-Irish gothic fiction, the Victorian period remains central (ed. W. J. McCormack) [833]; identified with an Irish gothic tradition as distinctly Protestant (do.) [837]; social origins in the countryside (do.) [838]; qualitatively different phase of literary history [from Bram Stoker et al..., do.], [846]; finely delineated studies in farouche desperation [...] in The Last September made rare use of her own Irish origins in a novel that employed the final stages of British occupation as the backdrop to a young girl’s encounter with new realities (do.) [853-54]; The Last September [bears] violent witness to big houses of Ireland, their ‘glory and their doom’ (Augustine Martin, ed.) [1022]; the tradition of the big house hardly produced a work equal to The Last September (ibid.) [1026]. BIOG., 949 [as above]. Vol. 3 selects Seven Winters, Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1943) [453-55].
Anne Owen Weekes, ed., Unveiling Treasures (Dublin: Attic 1993) cites passage from Last September, with plot summary. [Biog. as supra; corrig. father d.1928 from 1938, other source]; Naylor family at Danielstown, and niece Lois Farquar; also Laurence, the Naylor nephew at Oxford, and Gerald Lesworth, the British Officer. [‘I’m not English ... Thank God!’]
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984), bio-note: 1899-1973; novelist, b. Dublin, only child of a barrister; ed. Downe House School, Kent, and in Ireland and Europe; m. Alan Cameron in 1923; first book Encounters (1923); best known for The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart (1938).
Anthologies, Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares & Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994), selects “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met”, from The Mulberry Tree (Poolbeg 1978). Hermione Lee, The Secret Self: A Century Of Short Stories By Women (Phoenix 1995) incls. Bowen’s story, “Her Table Spread”. Other anthologies with stories by Bowen incl. Derek Hudson, ed., Classic English Short Stories 1930-1955 (OUP 1971), and Evelyn Conlon & Hans-Christian Oeser, eds., Cutting the Night in Two: Short Stories by Irish Women Writers (Dublin: New Island 2001).
Booksellers' Catalogues
Hyland Books (1997) lists Lady Cynthia Asquith, ed., The Funny Bone, New Humorous Stories (London: Jarrold 1928), 287pp.; Selected Stories [Hour Glass Library] (Dublin 1946); ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Stories [1st ed.] (1937) [incl. Bowen, Joyce, O’Connor, O’Faolain, O’Flaherty among the 26 authors]; Jocelyn Brooke: Elizabeth Bowen Supplement to British Book News, No. 28. 1952.
Peter Ellis (Cat. 19; 2003) lists Angela Thirkill, An Angela Thirkill Omnibus [Ankle Deep; High Rising; Wild Strawberries] (London: Hamish Hamilton 1966), with 3pp. Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen.
Libraries: BELFAST PUBLIC LIBRARY holds Shelbourne, Centre of Dublin Life (1951). HARRY RANSOM HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTER (Texas Univ., Austin), holds MSS of the majority of her novels together with extensives correspondence [online].
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Notes
The Last September (1929), Set in Co. Cork during the Irish Troubles of 1919-20, the novel deals with the emotional awakening of Lois Farquar, a young, unformed woman living at Danielstown, the home of her aunt and uncle, Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor. Hugo Montmorency and his ailing wife Francie are sem-permanent guests at Danielstown also. Hugo is a charming but ineffectual: he has sold his own country house (inherited from his wife’s family), planning to move to Canada at the time but forever lacking the determination to do so. He is the initial object of Lois’s attachment, which afterwards shifts to Gerald, a young officer stationed nearby. Gerald presses an unwanted engagement on her but is killed in an ambush soon after. Meanwhile Marda, a sophisticated young woman, comes to visit Danielstown. Hugo and Lois are drawn to her in different ways, as too is Laurence, a young relation of Lady Naylor studying at Oxford who maintains an air of studied indifference to Lois (and life in Ireland generally). After scenes involving Anglo-Irish and Catholic bourgeois neighbours of different shades of social acceptability and Empire loyalty (including an intoxicating dance in the local British barracks where Lois unwillingly commits herself to Gerald), Lady Naylor brutally shreds Gerald’s hopes and the Montmorencys prepare to depart. A series of encounters with an IRA-man - son of tenants of the Naylors - lends urgency to the narrative while the eventual ‘execution’ of Danielstown and other ‘big houses’ in the surrounding area at the close brings an era of Irish history to a blazing conclusion.
The House in Paris (1935): Leopold, a ten-year old young illegitimate child, is brought to the Fisher’s home in Paris in expectation of meeting his mother Karen Michaelis who rejected him at birth. Leopold is the product of her affair with Max Ebhart when both of them were engaged to to others - respectively Ray Forrestier and Karen’s friend Naomi Fisher. Max has been driven to suicide by the malicious interference of Naomi’s mother. At the house Leopold meets a girl called Henrietta, situated similarly to himself, and is finally taken away by his stepfather Ray Forrestier in the course of events that reveal the child to be neurotically obsessed with his absent mother.
The Heat of the Day (1949): Stella Rodney is having an affair with Robert Kelway, an Englishman who is spying for the Nazis in wartime Britain. She is approached by Harrison, a British agent who is on to him, and offered his freedom if she has an affair with him (“I quite see. I’m to form a disagreeably assocaiation in order that a man many be left gree to go on selling his country.”) Though set mostly in London, the novel contains constrasting scenes in the imperilled “big house” own by her soldier-son in Ireland and the country house owned by Kelway. Stella finally confronts Robert in her London home and he confesses to spying for the Fascists before falling to his death in uncertain circumstances from a rooftop. The novel shows a mastery of atmosphere and is duly celebrated for its evocation of the war-time atmosphere there, as well as a masterly mixture of styles, but lacks for cogency at the level of plot. How and why Robert spies for Germany is never made clear, for instance (but perhaps because it is the more understandable Anglo-Irish form of ideological defections).
A World of Love (1955), a story of awakening girlhood passion, set in an Irish ‘big house’, and dealing with Jane Danby’s discovery of a packet of letters from the former owner Guy and thought to be addressed to her own mother Lilia, to whom he was engaged but later found to be to an unknown woman; Jane finally falls in love Richard Priam, breaking her obsession with her mother’s supposed lover.
Eva Trout (1969), a story of ruined childhood and life-long paranoia in which Eva leads her boarding-school teacher Iseult Smith, on whom she has a crush, to believe that she is pregnant by the latter’s newly-married husband, later travelling through America with a deaf-mute child whom she has illegal acquired; on her return to England, she steps in between Iseult and Constantine Ormeau, formerly her own father’s lover, and takes up with Henry Darcy, a neighbour’s son. She is finally killed by her deranged ‘child’ Jeremy at Victoria Station with a revolver from Iseult’s luggage.
Review: ‘Elizabeth Bowen, who started out with such authority in the Henry James country to which she refers once or twice here, has now moved into a still more rarefied world. Now certainly she is as curious, cryptic and capricious as Iris Murdoch. So actually is Eva Trout, her oversized and rather outlandish heroine-heiress who disappears unpredictably from time to time, having generated difficulties in between. But then Eva was “misbegotten” to begin with - abandoned as an infant by her mother who rushed off to a lover and death, shunted around in a slapdash fashion by her father who was more interested in the homosexual Constantine who becomes her guardian. In changing scenes Eva is seen long enough to become the enzyme of uncertainty and unrest that she is - disrupting the marriage of a former teacher, attracting the youngest son at a nearby vicarage, hovering here, unsettling there, disappearing to reappear eight years later with the deafmute who was “virtually born” to her but then is “not of her flesh and blood.” The child, Jeremy, shares in her anonymity: “Anyhow, what a slippery fish is identity; and what is it, besides a slippery fish” and how totally baffling is la Trout with her “genius for unreality?” And would you like her more if you could understand her better? Brushing the cobwebs aside, one is left only with the hooded enigma of her presence, a precarious reward were it not for the calligraphy of one of the enduring, elegant writers of our time.’ (Kirkus Reviews; see COPAC online.)
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Charles Ritchie: Ritchie’s diary documents the beginning his love affair with Elizabeth Bowen, which lasted until her death 32 years later. The first letter from Bowen that he kept was written at the time of their first separation when he left London for Ottawa in 1945. In it she told him he took with him ‘my real life, my only life, everything that is meant by my heart. I am in your keeping. And you are in mine.’ In the years that followed they were never under the same roof for more than a week, including the days they spent at Bowen’s Court each year - which she regarded as their joint home - days remembered for their intensity in her letters and his diaries. (See Victoria Glendinning, ‘I am in your keeping’, The Guardian, [Sat.] 7 February 2009, accessed online 28.08.2010).
Benedict Kiely: ‘Now this is exactly what Elizabeth Bown said to me: “Few of his critics have noticed about Henry James that he displayed all the careful qualities of a Protestant from Lower Ulster.’ ( Kiely, Sing to the Bird, London: Methuen 1991, p.141.)
Peter Somerville Large, The Irish Country House, A Social History (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1995), includes account of Bowen’s ‘furtive disposal’ of Bowen’s Court without advertisement for sale; see review by Desmond Guinness, in The Irish Times (1 July, 1995).
Seán Bán (Candid Sean): The candid additions to Seán Ó Faolain’s Vive Moi (1963; rev. edn. 1993) include remarks on the Queen of Bowen’s Court: ‘the last time I had lunched there [at Jammet’s] had been with Elizabeth Bowen in the role of another Dublin Matty O’Hara [cf. Mata Hari] carrying an Irish tricolour in one hand and in the other a Union Jack.’ (From full page extract, Sunday Independent, 12 Nov. 1993; p.6.) See also Augustine Martin, review of Roy Foster’s Paddy and Mr Punch (1993) [in Irish Times, q.d.]: Bowen invited O’Faolain to lunch at Jammet’s in 1941, two years after the end of their affair, he wondering why, and not knowing that she was a British agent at the time; includes sketch by Virginia Woolf: ‘very honourable horse-faced, upper-class hard constricted mind.’
Lunchtime express: Elizabeth Bowen is identified to as a reader for the publisher to whom Briony sends her manuscript in Ian MacEwan’s shortlisted Booker novel Atonement (Jonathan Cape 2001): ‘Simply put, you need the backbone of the story. It may interest you to know that one of your avid readers was Mrs Elizabeth Bowen. She picked up the bundle of typescript in an idle moment while passing through this office on her way to luncheon, asked to take it home to read, and finished it that afternoon. Initially, she thought the prose “too full, too cloying”, but with “redeeming shades of Dusty Answer” (which I wouldn’t have thought of at all). Then she was “hooked for a while” and finally she gave us some notes, which are, as it were, mulched into the above.’ (p.314.)
Rose Macaulay: ‘Macaulay’s memory of her free childhood in Italy is reflected in the half-wild character of the young girl, Barbary, who - sent to England to be “civilised”, for complicated family reasons - finds her true home among the ruins. Romantic and didactic though this novel is, it has a strong atmosphere (it would make a good film), comparable to - and surely influenced by - Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.’ (See Hermione Lee, review of Sarah Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay, in The Guardian, 14 June 2003.)
Mistress of the house: Elizabeth Jane Howard (Slipstream: A Memoir, Macmillan 2002), recalls how ‘Elizabeth Bowen, when brought breakfast in bed, took one swift look at the tray and said, “You’ve forgotten the Marmalade spoon.” Most people would think that funny, at any rate in retrospect, but with Jane Howard it seems another example of her domestic burdens. [... &c.].’ (Quoted in Sarah Curtis, review of same, Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov. 2002, p.25.)
Booked: In 1972 a Booker judges’ panel consisting of George Steiner, Cyril Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen gave the prize to John Berger for G. He gave half of it to the Black Panthers.
Family & home: family name ultimately derived from Ap Owen, occupants of a “court house”, Glamorganshire]; descended from Col. Henry Bowen, a Cromwellian settler who changed sides in the English Civil War and received a grant of land confiscated from Garrett Cushin [gent.], at Farahy; Bowen’s Court, located on the site of a former established in a ‘Court House’ of the family, commenced following Col. Bowen’s gg-son. marriage to Jane Cole, 1716, and completed in 1775; family associated with landlord beneficence in the Famine, g-m. of Elizabeth, Eliza Wade, having provided food in the basement of the house; famine pit at Farahy; the Bowens wintered at Bowens Court and summered at Herbert Placecapt. Bowen-Colthurst, who unlawfully executed Francis Sheehy-Skeffington during 1916 Rising, was a cousin.
“Notes of Ireland” is the title of the communications sent by Bowen to the British Wartime Ministry of Information for transmission to the Dominions Office; there is a gap in the archive from 1940 to 1942 arising from unknown causes. A letter to Virginia Woolf (1 July 1940) discussing the origins of this commission and her misgivings about it (‘Ireland can be dementing, if one’s Irish, and may well be so now’) is reprinted in Hermione Lee, ed., The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, Poolbeg 1986, pp.215-16; see R. F. Foster, ‘The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen’, in Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), p.331.
Source note: information in the Life section [supra] largely derives from Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen (Penguin 1986).
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