1. Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer notable for her books about "the Big House" of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.
18 Facts About Elizabeth Bowen
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Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, daughter of barrister Henry Charles Cole Bowen, who succeeded his father as head of their Irish gentry family traced back to the late 1500s, of Welsh origin, and Florence Isabella Pomeroy, daughter of Henry FitzGeorge Pomeroy Colley, of Mount Temple, Clontarf, Dublin, grandson of the 4th Viscount Harberton.
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Elizabeth Bowen was baptised in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street.
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Elizabeth Bowen was educated at Downe House School under the headship of Olive Willis.
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Elizabeth Bowen had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years.
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In 1930, Elizabeth Bowen became the first woman to inherit Elizabeth Bowen's Court, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland.
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Elizabeth Bowen's husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen's Court, where he died a few months later.
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For years, Elizabeth Bowen struggled to keep the house, lecturing in the United States to earn money.
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Elizabeth Bowen travelled to Italy in 1958 to research and prepare A Time in Rome, but by the following year, Bowen was forced to sell her beloved Bowen's Court, which was demolished in 1960.
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Elizabeth Bowen died in University College Hospital on 22 February 1973, age 73.
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Elizabeth Bowen is buried with her husband in St Colman's churchyard in Farahy, close to the gates of Bowen's Court.
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In 2009, Glendinning published Love's Civil War, a compilation of letters Elizabeth Bowen wrote to Charles Ritche during their relationship, and excerpts from Ritchie's diary.
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Elizabeth Bowen was interested in "life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off", in the innocence of orderly life, and in the eventual, irrepressible forces that transform experience.
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Elizabeth Bowen examined the betrayal and secrets that lie beneath a veneer of respectability.
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Elizabeth Bowen was an admirer of film and influenced by the filmmaking techniques of her day.
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The locations in which Elizabeth Bowen's works are set often bear heavily on the psychology of the characters and on the plots.
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Supernatural fiction writer Robert Aickman considered Elizabeth Bowen to be "the most distinguished living practitioner" of ghost stories.
18.
Elizabeth Bowen included her tale "The Demon Lover" in his anthology The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories.