Elizabeth Bowen

This edited collection, provides a complete academic account of the fictions of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973 ) the most important Anglo-Irish novelist of the 20th century. It covers Bowen’s life, her family background and her writing career between London and North Cork. Of particular interest is her position as an Anglo-Irish writer and her centrality as a major novelist within the traditions of 20th century writing, within modernist literature and, in particular, within modern Irish writing. This book provides an overall cultural context for her novels and short stories. Each chapter explores Bowen’s links with other 20th century novelists and her modernist deployment of the novel form, her representation of Ireland, of the Anglo-Irish and of the Irish War of Independence. Also considered are the wide range of Bowen’s short stories from 1929 up to 1967 and her experience of living in London during the Second World War.Other chapters discuss the changes in narrative form used in Bowen’s last novels, novels of experimentation and increasing darkness. This book locates her writings within contemporary notions of the construction of gender in relation to fictive representations of sexuality and sexual identity. Bowen has been read as a modernist, a structuralist and also within feminist and post-colonial theories of fiction writing. Since her death in 1973, Bowen’s novels have been constantly in print and many critics and biographers, like Victoria Glendinning, Patricia Craig, Neil Corcoran, Hermione Lee, Maud Ellmann, Roy Foster and many others have written on her. This book provides a comprehensive scholarly account of her creative life and that critical afterlife.