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Biography

Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 in Dublin. Her father was a barrister. Though the family lived in Dublin during the winter, they spent the summers in their country house – Bowen’s Court – County Cork, which had considerable influence on Bowen, particularly when writing The Last September. She also wrote a separate, non-fiction book about it. Her father had a nervous breakdown when Bowen was six and she and her mother moved to England. After her mother died, Bowen was brought up by her aunts (fictionalised in The Death of the Heart). When her father recovered, he remarried and she spent time with him at Bowen’s Court in the summers. She went to art school in London but then met and married a British civil servant. They lived in London but, once Bowen’s father died, she would spend her summers at Bowen’s Court. She decided early on that she would be a writer and started writing short stories before writing her novels. Though she remained married till her husband’s death in 1952, she had a series of affairs which she used as basis

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Manuscripts and correspondence make up the bulk of the Elizabeth Bowen Collection, 1923-1975, and reflect Bowen's literary career. The material is organized into four series: I. Works, 1926-1975 (9.5 boxes), II. Correspondence, 1923-1969 (2 boxes), III. Financial and Legal Papers, 1927-1947 (1 box), and IV. Miscellaneous, 1951-1967 (.5 box). Within each series the material is arranged alphabetically by title or author. This collection was previously accessible only through a card catalog, but has been re-cataloged as part of a retrospective conversion project.The Works Series consists of holograph drafts, typescripts, galley proofs, notes, and fragments of novels, stories, articles, essays, radio broadcasts, lectures, reviews, and translations. The Center has manuscript holdings for the majority of Bowen's novels, including Eva Trout (1968), Friends and Relations (1931), The Heat of the Day (1948), The Hotel (1927), The House in Paris (1935), The Last September (1929), The Little Girls (1963), To the North (1932), and A W
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photo © Antoine Robiez, 2013
by Aimee Gasston
Elizabeth Bowen, born in Dublin in 1899 and keeping pace with the twentieth-century as it progressed until her death in 1973, was an extraordinary writer. Or, as Hermione Lee put it in her 1999 ‘estimation’ ofElizabeth Bowen, ‘one of the greatest writers of fiction in this language and in this century’. As an English undergraduate at the University of East Anglia, I was lucky enough to be taught Bowen’s novelThe Heat of the Day on a course about Blitz literature, alongside Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene. But, despite her formal experimentation, she was never taught alongside the experimental modernist canon and, when I took an MA in Modernism, Bowen was nowhere to be seen either. As a practising writer, Bowen was compared with her contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, as well as more historical heavyweights, Jane Austen and George Eliot. This reputation is not widely sustained today and this peculiarity is likely linked to the strangeness of her fiction. Because Bowen’s writing does not come