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Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited. Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelbourne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), After-thought (essays 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book, Eva Trout (1969) She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.
??It is many years, close to thirty, since Elizabeth Bowen wrote her best remembered books, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart, both of which were rather Jamesian in the worlds within worlds they explored. This new book may call to mind The Beast in the Jungle, in its expectant vigil and the devastating revelation at its conclusion- There, being nothing was what you were frightened of all the time . On its own, it is a discreetly tantalizing story, a parabola of time present and past when three women return some fifty years later to a childhood scene. The instigator now, as she was then, is Dinah Delacroix, artlessly attractive, somewhat offhand, even a little fey. The museum she is establishing in a cave as a clue for posterity has its past in Dinah's. At eleven, she had had a penchant for burying things, and with two friends, Clare and Sheila, had interred some secret belongings in a coffer. Impulsively contacting Clare and Sheila whom she has not seen since, the reunion, uneasy at best, stirs many memories and latent resentments, and the revenants make their anticipatory-apprehensive return to the chest which lies buried in a school garden.... A disconcerting, elliptical book of considerable charm. It has a special, subtle sortilege. (Kirkus Reviews)
