The Mulberry Tree

by Elizabeth Bowen

This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant, and unpublished letters to close friends as Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, written with as much elegance and energy as her 'public' writing. In her introduction, Hermoine Lee shows how these writings display the same interests as Elizabeth Bowen's fiction - in Anglo-Irish dispossession and ambivalence, in the persistence of chilhood feelings, in treachery, ghosts, and the mysterious power of place, the lure of nostalgia , and the clash between individual and society.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Literary Criticism

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1987

About the author

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.

Reviews

[Aniek Verheul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly entertaining, beautifully written collection. Bowen's prose is as masterful here as it is in her fiction. I particularly enjoyed the essays, letters, and autobiographical writing included here, while I didn't care much for the reviews - something I ascribe to the fact that I haven't read any of the reviewed material and not to Bowen's writing. I do wish this edition was a little clearer about the fact that it has endnotes. Whether that would be in the shape of adding them onto the page as footnotes or simply indicating them with an asterisk on the page, I don't really mind, but I found myself frequently looking up information on the internet, only to remember later that I could've saved myself the effort and flipped to the back instead. I don't know, maybe that says more about me as a reader than about this collection, but I've found that such notes are usually indicated more clearly, and that definitely has my preference.