Biography Essay

Between 1923, when her first volume of short stories, Encounters, appeared, and 1975, when her last volume of memoirs, Pictures and Conversations, was published posthumously, Elizabeth Bowen produced a new book almost every year, her longest lapse being the five-year period between A World of Love (1955) and A Time in Rome (1960). Four of her books were republished short stories from earlier collections; the rest—twentyfive in all—are comprised of autobiographical and critical writings and histories as well as the prose fiction for which she is best known. In addition to these works in book form, Elizabeth Bowen regularly wrote reviews and articles for periodicals such as the New Statesman and Nation, the Tatler, the Spectator, Cornhill Magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature, New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper's, and in the late 1950s she became associate editor of the London Magazine, which...