Word: bowen
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Author Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 and died in 1973. The generous expanse of her life was even greater than the raw dates suggest. Her earliest years were spent in a social system that was virtually indistinguishable from feudalism. She was raised at Bowen's Court, the family home in County Cork, Ireland, on land that had been in Bowen possession since 1653. She spent her last years teaching in American colleges, living in rooms or rented apartments and listening to students worrying about the war in Viet Nam. At the end, her life had been touched directly...
Along the way she had written ten novels, numerous short stories, essays and several travel books, winning for her work a respectful following both in Britain and the U.S. Biographer Victoria Glendinning, a British journalist who has lived in Ireland, argues passionately that Bowen is important, not only for her writings but also for her timing. Thanks to the Irish
...Rising, Bowen was destined to be the last of the Anglo-Irish writers, a lively breed that included Sheridan, Swift and Oscar Wilde. Bowen also brushed against Bloomsbury during her early years as a writer. Writes Glendinning: "She is the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark...
Such follow-the-dots criticism invites rude noises. Glendinning is on safer ground when she ignores her own theories and simply tells the story of Elizabeth Bowen's life. It is a fascinating tale. Elizabeth's parents were perfectly matched in their weaknesses: dreamy, high-strung people for whom life proved to be too much. Her father had a nervous breakdown in 1905, and her mother died in 1912. Faced with all this, Elizabeth developed a strategy of "not noticing" and emerged into gawky adolescence with big hands, big feet, a stammer and pronounced nearsightedness. She married Alan...
...settled after marriage was her career as a writer. She began writing short stories and, in remarkable time, had secured an influential patron (Rose Macaulay), an agent and some small renown. London literary life in the 1920s was both glittering and, with the right connections, easy to crack. "Inconceivably," Bowen wrote later, "I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley...