A Modern Literary Life

This revelatory new work sets the life of one of the foremost writers of fiction in the 20th-century in its several contexts including her busy life in literary London, and her experiences during the Blitz (when she was an ARP Warden). / The author is a leading scholar noted for her work on Irish fiction, nation, women, and gender. / Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was born in Dublin into an Anglo-Irish family of Welsh extraction, which had settled in Cork in the 17th century. She inherited the ancestral house, as she recounted in Bowen's Court (1942). She then lived in a succession of southern English seaside resorts. She was briefly an art student in London and then began publishing her acclaimed stories and novels. / Living overlooking Regent's Park she became a prominent figure who made a large circle of literary friends including Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Iris Murdoch, and Lord David Cecil. She was an accomplished and popular hostess, and a witty public speaker. Despite these commitments her output and her studies of relationships were considerable, intellectually ambitious, highly personal, and unrelenting. Her last years were spent in Hythe, Kent, where she died.