Elizabeth Bowen - Life

Life

Elizabeth Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, Ireland and was baptized in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents Henry Charles Cole Bowen and Florence Colley Bowen later brought her to Bowen's Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery, County Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts. 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 find a publisher for her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Encounters (1923).

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". 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 socialized 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 Bowen would go on to write The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). In 1937 she was made 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 Irish neutrality. Bowen's political views tended towards Burkean conservatism. During and after the war she wrote among the greatest expressions of life in wartime London, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) and The Heat of the Day (1948). She was awarded the CBE in 1948.

Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, where Alan Cameron died a few months later. Since inheriting it many writers had visited her at Bowen's Court, including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Iris Murdoch. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1957 her portrait was painted at Bowen's Court by her friend Patrick Hennessy. She traveled to Italy in 1958 to research and prepare A Time in Rome (1960) but by the following year Bowen was forced to sell her beloved Bowen's Court. It was demolished in 1960. After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen finally settled in 'Carbery', Church Hill, Hythe in 1965.

Her final novel Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1968) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1969 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1970. Subsequently, she was among the judges (with her friend Cyril Connolly) that awarded the 1972 Man Booker Prize to John Berger for G. She spent Christmas of 1972 at Kinsale, County Cork with her friends Major Stephen Vernon and Lady Ursula Vernon (daughter of the Duke of Westminster) but was hospitalized upon her return home. Here she was visited by Isaiah Berlin, Cyril Connolly, Ursula Vernon, Rosamund Lehmann, her literary agent Spencer Curtis Brown, and Charles Ritchie.

Elizabeth Bowen died of lung cancer in a London hospital on 22 February 1973, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy churchyard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court. There is a memorial plaque to the author (which bears the words of John Sparrow) in the entrance to St. Colman's Church at Farahy, where a commemoration of her life is held annually.

In 1977, Victoria Glendinning published the first biography on Elizabeth Bowen. In 2009 Glendinning published a book about the relationship between Ritchie and Bowen, based on his diaries and her letters to him. English Heritage erected a Blue Plaque at 2 Clarence Terrace in March 2012.