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Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.
A republication, with a new preface, of Elizabeth Bowen's second novel which appeared originally in 1929. This, more than any of her works, has a deep, clouded spontaneous source in her own youth in Ireland during the troubled times when guerilla guns reverberated against a formal tradition which has its direct reflection here. For it is the succession of tennis parties and dances, teas and visits which frames and stirs the life within Danielstown, the home of the Naylors, imperiously and at times imperviously Anglo-Irish aristocrats whose social snobberies extend as well to the British officers garrisoned there. Among them is Gerald, who falls in love with their niece Lois, Lois who is impressionably and wishfully romantic, anxious to match the absolutism of Gerald's love. And that lovely, too mortal month comes to its close with Gerald's death, and the burning of the house which is to free Lois for the future of which she is still so unsure, while for the Naylore there is only the desolate destruction of a world which is both substance and symbol... The narrative here is fragmentary- to a point of fraility: but there is once again the matchless pervasiveness of place and time as it touches off a private world of expectant emotion and intimation. (Kirkus Reviews)
