Elizabeth Bowen(1899–1973)

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born at 15 Herbert Place, Dublin, on the seventh of June 1899, only child of Henry Charles Cole Bowen, an Anglo-Irish barrister and proprietor of the Bowen's Court estate at Kildorrery in north Cork, and Florence Colley of Carlow. The Bowen family were a Welsh line settled in Cork since the seventeenth-century Cromwellian plantation; the surname ap Owen. Her father had a breakdown in 1905 from overwork at the Land Commission and the seven-year-old Elizabeth was taken by her mother to a long sequence of rented seaside lodgings on the Kent coast at Folkestone, Hythe and Dover. Her mother died of cancer in 1912 when Elizabeth was thirteen and the girl was placed with relatives and schooled at Downe House in Kent, then at the London County Council School of Art at Southampton Row from 1918.

She published her first volume of short stories, Encounters, in 1923, took up a writing residence at Old Headington outside Oxford on her 1923 marriage to the educational administrator Alan Cameron, and through the 1920s and 1930s built her reputation as one of the central English-language novelists of the inter-war period. The novels of the period run from The Hotel (1927) and The Last September (1929, the great Anglo-Irish elegy of the burning of the country houses in the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921) through Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), and her central pre-war novel The Death of the Heart (1938), the Henry James-inflected London novel of the orphaned Portia and the Quayne household at Windsor Terrace, on every modern list of the central English novels of the late inter-war period.

She moved to London in 1935 with her husband's appointment as Secretary of the BBC Central Council for Schools Broadcasting, took the small house at 2 Clarence Terrace overlooking Regent's Park in 1935, and through the war years 1939 to 1945 produced the body of London-Blitz writing on which her reputation in part rests: the short-story collections Look at All Those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) including the title story, In the Square, Mysterious Kor and the great novel of wartime London The Heat of the Day (published 1949 but written through 1944 to 1948). The Heat of the Day, the espionage-and-love narrative set in the London of the Blitz, is the central English novel of the wartime Home Front. She served in those years as a London air-raid warden in Marylebone and as a Ministry of Information rapporteur on Irish neutrality, travelling repeatedly across to Dublin to write Confidential Reports to the British government on the Irish position.

She inherited Bowen's Court in north Cork on her father's death in 1930, kept it through the war years, and from 1952 to 1959 made it her principal residence; the long Anglo-Irish memoir Bowen's Court (1942) is the central documentary account of the Cromwellian plantation family in late survival. She was forced by death duties to sell the house in 1960 to a local farmer who, in the agricultural economics of the period, demolished it for the stone. She moved to a small cottage at Hythe in Kent, was made a Companion of the Order of Literature (CBE) in 1948, took the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from the University of Oxford in 1956, and died at the University College Hospital, London, on the twenty-second of February 1973 in her seventy-fourth year. The Bowen name in modern English-language literature carries the weight of the Anglo-Irish novelist who put the burning of the country houses, the London Blitz and the Henry-James-inflected formal English novel into the literary register of the mid-twentieth century.