Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen , 1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist, b. Dublin. In impeccable prose she treated love and frustration through studies of complex psychological relationships. Her novels include The Hotel (1927), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1936), The Death of the Heart (1938), and The Heat of the Day (1949). In her last three novels— A World of Love (1955), Two Little Girls (1964), and Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes (1968)—Bowen was less concerned with rendering reality than with exploring truths best expressed in myth or parable. Look at All Those Roses (1941), Ivy Gripped the Steps (1946), and A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965) are volumes of short stories. Nonfiction works include Bowen's Court (1942), on her ancestral home; The Shelbourne Hotel (1951); and Seven Winters; and Afterthoughts (1962), a collection of childhood memories and literary studies. Pictures and Conversations (1975) is a collection of miscellaneous writings, including portions of a novel and autobiography left unfinished at Bowen's death.

Bibliography: See biographies by E. J. Kenney (1975), V. Glendinning (1978), P. Craig (1987), and N. Corcoran (2005); studies by H. Blodgett (1975), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), A. E. Austin (rev. ed. 1989), P. Lassner (1991), A. Bennett and N. Royle (1994), R. C. Hoogland (1994), L. Christensen (2001), and M. Ellmann (2003).

Bowen, Elizabeth Dorothea Cole (1899–1973), Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Her novels include The Hotel (1927), The House in Paris (1935), A World of Love (1955), and Eva Trout (1969). The best-known are probably The Death of the Heart (1938), and The Heat of the Day (1949). The first is the story of Portia, a 16-year-old orphan whose dangerous innocence threatens the precarious, sophisticated London lives of her half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, and who is herself threatened by her love for the glamorously despairing young Eddy, an admirer of Anna; the second centres on the tragic wartime love affair of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway, and their reactions to the revelation, through the sinister Harrison, that the latter is a spy. The war inspired many of Elizabeth Bowen's best short stories, including ‘Mysterious Kôr’ (Penguin New Writing, 1944); her Collected Stories appeared in 1980. She writes most confidently of the upper class and middle classes, but within that social range her perceptions of change are acute.