Writer Elizabeth Bowen lived here. This Elizabeth Bowen Blue plaque marks a place of literary history. Elizabeth Bowen a novelist and short story writer lived here from 1935 to 1952.
Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. Her full name was Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen. Her father suffered a nervous breakdown when she was six. She and her mother moved to England. Her mother died of cancer when Bowen was thirteen. Aunts raised her.
Bowen married Alan Cameron in 1923. It has been described as a sexless but contented union. She had extra-marital relationships.
Elizabeth Bowen’s career spanned several decades. It went from the early 1920s until the late 1960s. Her novels and short stories have continued to attract readers and critics since her death. Bowen was commercially successful. She drew critical and scholarly interest. Her works appealed to popular and avant-garde tastes. She mixed with modernist writers and critics. These included Woolf and Eliot.
Bowen’s writings show keen interest in the uncanny nature of perception. She had a highly developed sense of the visual. She also had an interest in social interaction. Bowen experimented with various literary styles and forms. Her best writing dramatizes clashes between literary forms.
Bowen published her first short story collection in 1923. It was titled Encounters. In 1925, Bowen and her husband moved to Oxford. In 1927, she published her first novel. It was titled The Hotel.
Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court in 1930. She spent summers there. Her novels continued into the 1930s. By that time, Bowen and Alan Cameron had moved to London. They lived in Regent’s Park. In 1938, she published her most successful novel. It was titled The Death of The Heart.
During World War II, Bowen worked for the British Ministry of Information. She reported on Irish opinion. After the war, she wrote expressions of life in wartime London. These were The Demon Lover and Other Stories and The Heat of the Day. She was awarded the CBE in 1948.
She and her husband retired to Bowen’s Court in 1952. Alan Cameron died suddenly. Bowen struggled to keep her home. In 1955, she published her second Irish novel. It was titled A World of Love. She was forced to sell Bowen’s Court in 1959. The house was demolished the next year. She moved back to England.
Bowen bought a house in Hythe in Kent in 1965. Her mother had died there. Bowen died in London in 1973. She was buried in Farahy in north County Cork. It was near the site of Bowen’s Court.
Bowen’s themes included the fragility of personal identity. They also included the fracturing of external perception. Other themes were the comedy of social class. Also the diffuse nature of sexuality. And varied possibilities of erotic selfhood.
Bowen’s war novel is considered one of the quintessential depictions of London’s atmosphere during the bombing raids of World War II.
Bowen died of lung cancer in 1973. Remember Elizabeth Bowen a writer who lived and worked here. Her legacy lives on through her novels and stories.