PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
Psychological novel with something of Evelyn Scott's ability to create suspense out of place. There's a haunting fascination about it, that lays hold of the readers - and that carries one back to now one part, now another, in retrospect. One feels overpowering curiosity from the moment the two children meet - and the recreation of the past is convincingly and beautifully handled, with no sense of anticlimax such as often attends the precarious balancing of a story within a story. A big step in technique and handling over her previous novels. The jacket is somewhat misleading, it seems to me; it would lead one to expect a somewhat frivolous, flippant story, rather than the strange blend of tragedy and humor which it is. Just a passing suggestion of the Lesbian theme, this time; unimportant. (Kirkus Reviews)
