Elizabeth Bowen
(1899–1973)

The fiction of Elizabeth Bowen is distinguished by the author's subtle observation of landscape, by her innovative and believable use of the supernatural, by her haunting portrayal of England during one of the darkest eras of the country's history—the years between 1939 and 1945.

Bowen was born in Dublin and raised in County Cork, Ireland. She published her first novel, The Hotel, in 1927. In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, she completed one of her best-known works, The Death of the Hearth. This novel traces the intertwining loves and fortunes of a group of sophisticated but vulnerable Londoners in the 1930s.

During the war, Bowen observed England's hardships keenly and with compassion. The brutal realities of the conflicts—air raids, blackouts, and espionage—were incorporated into some of her best short stories. Typically she played on the heightening of emotions and perceptions in wartime to probe the inner workings of her characters' minds. Shortly after the end of the war Bowen published another novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), which was received with much acclaim. Set in wartime London, the work movingly juxtaposes a tragic love affair with the larger national dilemma of the country's fight for its survival.

After the death of her husband in 1952, Bowen returned to Ireland to live. Although her earlier work was influenced by the psychological realism of Henry James, her later novels—A World of Love (1955), The Little Girls (1964), and Eva Trout (1969)—exhibit a more symbolic, more poetic style. Bowen never adopted the stream-of-consciousness technique practiced by her contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Yet readers may easily sense more than a trace of this technique in Bowen's novels and stories—such is her sensitivity to find shades of emotion and her eye for small but important details.

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