Born in Dublin in 1899, Elizabeth Bowen was the only child of Anglo-Irish Protestant parents. Her father was Henry Bowen, a practicing lawyer in Dublin. He married Florence Colley when he was twenty-nine in 1890. Both of Elizabeth's parents were descendants of the pseudo-aristocracy Oliver Cromwell had created after the Civil War, called the Ascendancy class. The Ascendants were originally soldiers in Cromwell's army who settled in the English province of Ireland. Henry and Florence Bowen made a happy couple that Elizabeth described by saying, "My father and mother have made by their marriage, and lived in, a world of their own."(1) Ms. Bowen attributes her link with places and objects instead of people to the way her parents interacted with her and each other. "My parents did not always communicate with each other, and I did not always communicate with them. They were both very Independent of other people. I had been born, I see now, into a home at once unique and intensive, gently phenomenal."(2)
Elizabeth Bowen's early life was similar to a piece of white marble, bright and cheerful, but shot through with darker streaks. When she was five, her father committed himself to a mental hospital in Dublin after a nervous breakdown. Elizabeth and her mother left Ireland for England more than a year afterwards and spent five years there. While in England, Bowen's exposure to the history of the island made great impacts on her. She ascribes some of her ability as a writer of fiction to the time spent in England, "Possibly, it was England made me a novelist."(3) Ms. Bowen returned to Ireland with her mother to a newly recovered Henry Bowen in 1912 and the three of them spent their last summer together in Bowen's Court, the family estate. By the end of the summer Florence died of cancer. This blow worsened Elizabeth's childhood stammer, which persisted through her adult life.
At the beginning of World War One Elizabeth was enrolled in a school for girls in Kent called Downe House. The strict headmistress of Downe House demanded that students not engage in any childlike behavior. The rigidness of the atmosphere curbed the girls' means of expression. Bowen learned the subtle art of communication while attending Downe as a result of the environment.
Importantly, after her graduation in 1917 her old headmistress introduced her to an already established author and critic, Rose Macaulay. Macaulay recommended Bowen's work to the editor of the Saturday Westminster, where Elizabeth's first stories appeared. The stories printed in the Saturday Westminster were reprinted as a collection called Encounters in 1923.
Nineteen-twenty three also marked Bowen's marriage to Alan Cameron, who worked as the Secretary of Education for the Oxford school system. They settled in the town of Old Headington, near Oxford. While living in Old Headington she published her first novel, The Hotel. Elizabeth immersed herself in the literary circles of Oxford and was quickly accepted. Among others, she met and befriended Virginia Woolf and Rosamund Lehmann. While still in Oxford Elizabeth published her second novel, The Last September, and a third set of short stories, Joining Charles.
The year after The Last September was published Henry Bowen became ill and died, leaving Bowen's Court to his only heir, Elizabeth. She began to shuttle back and forth between Ireland and England with greater frequency, staying alternately in Oxford, London, and County Cork. The burden of Bowen's Court weighed on Elizabeth until 1960. Increasing costs of maintaining the old mansion forced her to sell it.
The 1930's brought Elizabeth increasingly more often to London. She began to contribute regularly to several magazines. Friends and Relations and To the North were published in the first couple years of the decade and brought her international attention. Her social life, important to her since her days at Downe House, became increasing larger as she visited other centers of literature. In 1935 Elizabeth completed The House in Paris.
The theme of passion seen underlying many of Bowen's works seeped into her private life during the thirties as well. Her first known affair, with a lecturer at Oxford, changed her self-concept and began a long string of such events. Bowen continued to engage in a series of affairs for the rest of her life, ". . . mostly with men but occasionally also with women . . . "(4) Surprisingly, she managed to keep her marriage not only sound but happy as well.
In the late 1930's Alan Cameron received a new job with the British Broadcasting Service in London. The couple moved into London and bought a house at Regent's Park. The Death of the Heart was published in the first years they lived in London and features Regent's Park prominently.
World War Two brought sweeping changes to the social order in London, creating a more unified society. Elizabeth, swept up in the fervor of the moment, became an Air Raid Precaution warden as well as working for the Ministry of Information. Her deep involvement in the war effort at home as well as her continued work on short stories and essays slowed her labor on The Heat of the Day.
The end of the war brought with it a decline in Alan Cameron's health and the beginning of honorary recognition for Bowen's writing skills. In 1949 she was granted an honorary doctorate of literature from Trinity College in Dublin. Only three years later Alan died. A World of Love was published later in that decade. After the loss of her companion of nearly thirty years Elizabeth began to wander the world, mostly the United States. She was granted fellowships at many universities while on lecture tours.
After the sale of Bowen's Court in 1960 Elizabeth published two more novels, The Little Girls
and Eva Trout. Eva Trout, published in 1969, completed Bowen's finished works. She was
diagnosed with cancer in 1971 and died two years later. At the time of her death, Elizabeth was
working on an autobiography entitled, "Pictures and Conversations," which was published in
1974.
Two details must be recognized as shaping forces in Bowen's writing. First, the role sexuality and love played in her works. Second, the function and importance of the wars Bowen lived through in relation to her style and material. Both help to define the author Bowen was.
Sexuality and love plays a large part in every major work by Bowen. Her first, second, and fourth novels all portray a young female protagonist just becoming involved in her first serious love. All are smart and attractive but incapable of dealing with the emotional strains of the relationship the novels revolve around. The Hotel and The Last September allow the protagonist to escape the confines of the relationship, but only to emerge into a void of unknowing. Emmeline, the protagonist in To the North, deals with the situation in an individual way, by killing herself, but escapes the situation nonetheless.
Friends and Relations, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart all fall into line with the first, second and fourth books. Dealing mainly with life before and after the flaw of love strikes the women protagonists, Bowen's third, fifth, and sixth books fit nicely into the pattern.
Elizabeth Bowen's most acclaimed piece is her sixth novel, The Death of the Heart. The complexity of the work is greater than that of any of her previous full length novels.
"The Death of the Heart is the kind of novel an author undoubtedly aims for each time he
undertakes one. Every decision seems to be correct, and all of the disparate components are
harmonized. The past, the present, and the intervening years are all realized at once in the first
third of the novel. The remainder of the narrative is devoted not merely to the laying of a
troublesome past but to the emerging issues of the present. Bowen's master stroke is in having
two heroines. She combines the story that concerned her in the first groups of novels, of first
love, with her more recent narrative interest. The younger heroine becomes in this way a
correlative for the earlier years of the older one. Actually, the central impact of the story derives
less from the outcome of the first love or the confrontation with debilitating memories than from
the dynamic relationships of the two women."(5)
The other major influencing factor in Elizabeth Bowen's life was the long string of wars fought during her lifetime. Beginning when she was attending Downe House and the outbreak of World War One wars went on all around her for the rest of her life. When World War Two intruded into her life in the form of a demolished Regent's Park home, Bowen wrote her only major novel dealing with war. The Heat of the Day is the beginning of the last set of Bowen's works. It was at this point that she began to experiment with styles. This seems to be the effect the continual war or the lack thereof had on her.
Elizabeth Bowen was once one of the most respected female Anglo-Irish writers of this century.
After her death in 1973 concern in her writing dropped dramatically, until her name is almost
unremembered. Recently, however, there has been a slight rise in interest in her works. This is
due to the feministic way in which she presents herself in her writing, despite the fact that she
considered herself to be an author before she was a woman.
"That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The island stood frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun- but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.
"On a foot bridge between the island and the mainland a man and a woman stood talking, leaning on the rail. In the intense cold, which made everyone hurry, they had choosen to make this long summerlike pause. Their oblivious stillness made them look like lovers- actually, their elbows were some inches apart: they were riveted not to each other but to what she said. Their thick coats made their figures sexless and stiff as chessmen; they were well-to-do, inside bulwarks of fur and cloth their bodies generated a steady warmth; they could only see the cold- or, if they felt it, they only felt it at their extremeties. Now and then he stamped on the bridge, or she brought her muff up to her face. Ice pushed down the channel under the bridge, so that while they talked their reflections were constantly broken up."(6)
Endnotes
1. Renee C. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 4.
2. Renee C. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 4.
3. Renee C. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 6.
4. Renee C.Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 12.
5. Allan E. Austin, Elizabeth Bowen, revised ed. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 31.
6. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1969), 3-4.