Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography

by Victoria Glendinning

In this richly detailed biography, Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist whose literary achievements were equaled only by her unbounded gift for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen’s Court, to Oxford where she met Yeats and Eliot, to her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, this penetrating biography lifts the thin veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her shimmering novels. We see her at elegant parties, where such friends as Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Evelyn Waugh fell under her spell; in post-war Vienna with Graham Greene; and in war-torn London, where she fell in love with a younger man who was unprepared for life at the pitch she lived it. We see her bound through several affairs to a comfortable marriage, living "life with the lid on." The world of Elizabeth Bowen was akin to that of her no one behaved shockingly, yet the passions that stirred within made her a master of the ultimate suspense of human relationships–the life of the heart.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, British Literature, Ireland, Biography Memoir

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.

She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 2 out of 5]

Learning about the biography of the writers we love can be a risky business. Becoming intimate with the details of Katherine Mansfield's life made me love her writing all the more. Conversely, I found out while reading this biography I'd rather not know the details of Elizabeth Bowen's life. A lot of what I discovered about her interfered with my love of her writing.

This book starts off on the wrong foot when in the introduction the author makes the absurd claim that Bowen's perception and insight are more incisive than Virginia Woolf's. I love Elizabeth Bowen's writing but Virginia Woolf patently operates on deeper levels. Bowen's talent was for beautifully painted atmospheric surfaces and hinting might what lay beneath. She rarely ventured beneath those surfaces as seems to be the case in her life. Her influences too were much less distilled, less alchemised than Virginia's. In her favour Bowen loved Virginia Woolf and probably would have been embarrassed by the author's outlandish claim. The author's exaggerated idea of Bowen's importance as a writer and constantly glowing appraisal of her as an individual jarred for me. It felt like she was writing about her best friend. It's probable Bowen is now a little underrated in the grand scheme of things but I don't think this will be redressed by overrating her. I found it strange that she has nothing but praise for Bowen's early flimsy novels but is faintly condescending about readers who think The Death of the Heart her best novel.

I learned Elisabeth Bowen was a conservative woman, both emotionally and politically (among other baffling stances, she was dismissive of young Americans protesting the Vietnam war). And that what she wasn't as an individual was particularly inspiring.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't usually read a biography of a writer before I've read her fiction, and I wouldn't recommend it. There's less richness as a result and more potential spoilers. But Bowen is someone whose work I hadn't managed to read yet--she's never included in any of the literature anthologies I teach or come across though she wrote a number of short stories--and not one of her novels is to be found in my usually very good local library. It's hard to imagine that at one time her novels were more popular in the U.S. than in Britain (acc. to her biographer). But there are writers and readers who have great respect for her work, and thinking her biography (which I found on some giveaway shelf somewhere) might provide both insight and impetus to get there, I went ahead and read it. The Avon paperback, published in 1977, shed its black and white photographs (none very interesting) before I was done reading and then split into two parts, but still I persevered.

Glendinning is respectful. Perhaps too much so. I think it's the first time I've read a biography of an author where her affair with a married man is described, a number of pages are devoted to him and it and her, but the man is never once named. Such a time, when one could go without naming names, seems quaint and even absurd now. Probably he was still living when the biography appeared. But still.

I like Bowen's turns of phrase. Her brain, she writes in a letter, felt "like scorched porridge." To her longtime Canadian friend (also lover, I assume? it's never made entirely clear) Charles Ritchie, Elizabeth (an Anglo-Irish) writes: I think we are curiously self-made creatures, carrying our personal worlds around with us like snails their shells, and at the same time adapting to wheverever we are. In a queer way I am strongly and idiosyncratically recalcitrant, on the run, bristling with reservations and arrogances that one doesn't show.

It's apparent that Bowen is very good at writing about wartime London, when most of her novels and stories are set: "The hallucinations are an unconscious, instinctive, saving resort on the part of the characters...it is a fact that in Britain, and especially in London, many people had strange deep intense dreams." The fantasies, and the dreams, of ordinary people, were, Bowen thought, consoling compensation for what she called the "desiccation" that war brought, Glendinning tells us. "We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality," writes Bowen.

A serious writer but also one who managed a long marriage and was known for her dinner parties and salons, her charming conversation and presence. I look forward to reading her novels.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written biography, not very long, capturing time and space beautifully, which has introduced me to a delightful writer I have inexplicably never read before. A very good read!

[Kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this biography would have resonated more if I had read Bowen's novels. I was aware of her through May Sarton's journals. The author downplays Bowen's affair with Sarton, Sarton does not. The writing was lively, as was the subject but I couldn't shake the feeling that some facts were being censored.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glendinning gives just enough analysis of the works to highlight important themes and what makes Bowen worth reading, without tyrannizing over the reader's chance to form impressions, and without giving away too much of what will happen (important in the case of the ghost stories, for instance, although she does give away the ending of "Demon Lover.") She make the reader eager to turn to the works. Both Bowen and Glendinning made for happy company. Glendinning writs an enjoyable, fair-spirited life about someone she finds admirable without sounding all hagiographical.

[Kidlitter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stately lady biography by a biographer with such a massive crush on Bowen's Anglo-Irish gentry background, ancestral home of Bowen's Court, chichi friends in one of the more annoying literary periods - England in the prewar period when so much stank of mothballs - and Bowen's determination to ignore change at all costs that even a fan is uncomfortable at the breathless adoration of it all. You'd never guess from Glendinning how good Bowen's short stories can be, or why her novels seemed stuck in one key, however haunting, or why she does have a devoted following. But you will learn much about Bowen's milieu and since surface was so important to her fiction, perhaps this is a match. How far away Bowen's world seems, but a more questing literary appreciation might bring her a little closer for the contemporary reader.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography did not manage to convey to me qualities to explain why Elizabeth Bowen was so popular at social events, with other authors or why her writing was so successful.

Victoria Glendinning seems to seek to justify Elizabeth's position on class, socialism, Rhodesia, her continuing to smoke while having lung cancer, her poor taste in jewellery, her lack of intellectual study.....

The writing quoted is mannered.

[Jenny Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Helped me understand her work, life and times much better.

[Connor H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for any Bowen lover

[Mary Narkiewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent bio.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably really 3.5. This biography of Elizabeth Bowen was published only a few years after her death, and maybe lacks a little distance from the subject as a result. There's a feeling of holding back a bit (e.g. an affair with a married lover is described, in enough detail surely for people in the know to work out who he was, but he is not named - presumably he and/or his wife were still around in 1977). The demolition of Bowen's Court is quite shocking yet we don't hear that much about its effect on her. I have read some but by no means all of her books and this certainly hasn't put me off. Also interesting how many of the same people have at least walk-on parts in literary biographies - the literary world must have been quite a small circle.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have liked Elizabeth Bowen’s writing and I enjoyed this biography thoroughly. But I’m not likely to read any more Bowen. I loved two of the books I read, one I didn’t enjoy but it has stayed with me and the fourth one was wonderful in parts. But I knew I didn’t like Bowen the person and this biography confirms me in this.

Bowen was Anglo/Irish, part of the English Protestant Ascendancy. She would have referred to herself as Irish. It is a group that produced some wonderful writers, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Swift. She lived in the family Big House in Cork and they employed the local people, took care of them when they were sick or in need and fought their battles from time to time. But she was an out and out Tory and the comments she made when a Labor Govt took over in Britain after the war are bigoted and offensive. English and Anglo/Irish expats referred to themselves as in a ‘flight from Moscow’ as they settled or resettled in Ireland to flee Socialist England which was trying to rebuild after the war. They hoped to get cheap servants and avoid the the creation of a new society with National Health and Housing and Education and social mobility. I have no respect.
Eventually she found she couldn’t afford the Big House. While I had trouble finding sympathy for her at this time I found the selling and then destruction of the family home to be sad. And she was brave. Not rich but surviving and dignified.

This was written in 1977. Perhaps her long standing affair with Sean O’Faolain was not being spoken about then. The affair is described but not given significance and O’Faolain’s name is not used but he appears as a minor presence elsewhere in the book. Nevertheless for all this care about privacy there is a shocking detail exposing a possible oddity in Bowen’s marriage that I found intrusive and out of keeping with the rest of the book.

[Lelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very good biography and I enjoyed learning about Elizabeth Bowen. My only complaint about this biography is that it was published only about 4 years after Elizabeth's death. So the information is excellent, but some details are withheld, I presume because people still living at the time didn't want their private information to be revealed. One of Elizabeth's early lovers is never named. And her relationship with Charles Ritchie is presented as an abiding constant, but Vivian Gornick's "Unfinished Business," cites letters that suggest a cooling off on Ritchie's part. So, this biography provides a a great foundation for getting to know more about Bowen, but additional reading would be required to get at some of the more hidden layers of her life. Glendinning's later book Love's Civil War, containing letters and diaries of Bowen and Ritchie, would probably (I haven't read it yet) add considerably to a reader's understanding of Bowen.

[Typewriter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography of the Anglo-Irish great writer.

Glendinning is a judicious commentator, a good storyteller and a thorough researcher.

Bowen was impressively able to live 'life with the lid on' rather well. Perhaps there's something disappointing about that. Does it not draw us to Virginia Woolf to know of her personal fragility, insanity, suicide? As we identify with the sensitive do we not want to be able to empathise in vulnerability, in lack of ease with the way of the world?

Reach out to us please, Elizabeth. Don't just leave us with your brilliant art and go off to your party.

But I forgive you, of course. I'm glad you lived a happy life.

Husband Alan Cameron gets a Leonard Woolf award for playing the role unselfish, level-headed supportive spouse with uncomplaining dedication.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading her stories, which led me to her life. Reading biographies of writers whose worlds you've visited is like a passport, a Baedeker, to that world. I don't read biographies all at once, rather a bit at a time, rather in the way they experienced their lives.