Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen CBE (/ˈboʊən/ BOH-ən; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer notable for her books about "the Big House" of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.

In 1958, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson.

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, daughter of barrister Henry Charles Cole Bowen (1862–1930), who succeeded his father as head of their Irish gentry family traced back to the late 1500s, of Welsh origin, and Florence Isabella Pomeroy (died 1912), daughter of Henry FitzGeorge Pomeroy Colley, of Mount Temple, Clontarf, Dublin, grandson of the 4th Viscount Harberton. Florence Bowen's mother was granddaughter of the 4th Viscount Powerscourt. Elizabeth Bowen was baptised in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents later brought her to her father's family home, Bowen's Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery, County Cork, where she spent her summers. Among her enduring childhood friends were the artists Mainie Jellett and Sylvia Cooke-Collis.

When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in September 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts; her father remarried in 1918. She was educated at Downe House School under the headship of Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her seek a publisher for her first book, a collection of short stories titled Encounters (1923).^{[citation needed]}

In 1923, she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC. The marriage has been described as "a sexless but contented union." The marriage was reportedly never consummated. She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin and a relationship with the American poet May Sarton.

Bowen and her husband first lived near Oxford, where they socialised with Maurice Bowra, John Buchan, and Susan Buchan, and where she wrote her early novels, including The Last September (1929). Following the publication of To the North (1932), they moved to 2 Clarence Terrace, Regent's Park, London, where she wrote The House in Paris (1936) and The Death of the Heart (1938). In 1937, she became a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

In 1930, Bowen became the first (and only) woman to inherit Bowen's Court, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II, she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of neutrality. Bowen's political views tended towards Burkean conservatism. During and after the war she wrote about life in wartime London, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) and The Heat of the Day (1948), works which earned acclaim for their depiction of that period. In Ninety-nine Novels, Anthony Burgess wrote of The Heat of the Day that "No novel has better caught the atmosphere of London during the second world war."

Bowen was awarded the CBE in 1948. Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen's Court, where he died a few months later. Many writers visited her at Bowen's Court from 1930 onward, including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Iris Murdoch, and the historian Veronica Wedgwood. For years, Bowen struggled to keep the house, lecturing in the United States to earn money.