by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 into an Anglo-Irish family, the Bowens of Bowen’s Court in County Cork in Dublin, Ireland. The relative security of her early years was shattered in 1906 by her father’s nervous breakdown, after which her mother took Elizabeth to live in England. More upheaval followed when Elizabeth was 13 and her mother died of cancer. Elizabeth Bowen’s first collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1923, and was followed soon after by her marriage to Alan Cameron. The couple settled in Oxford in 1925, and it was there that Bowen established important and lifelong friendships with other writers and intellectuals. The next 13 years were extremely productive, resulting in the publication of three further collections of stories and six novels, including The Last September (1929), The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart...