Elizabeth Bowen's early years—while not quite as grim as those of Portia, the main character in her most well-regarded novel, The Death of the Heart—were unstable. She found herself at various times being raised by a group of aunts. On occasion, Bowen moved from house to house, similar to the treks from hotel to hotel that Portia and her parents make across France and Switzerland.

Bowen was born June 7, 1899, in Dublin, Ireland, into a wealthy and socially prominent family with ties to England. She was her parents' only child. When Bowen was seven, her father was hospitalized for a mental condition. She and her mother moved to England and spent the next five years moving from villa to villa on the Kent coast. While this could have been a lonely existence, both her parents came from large extended families, and an Anglo-Irish network of...