The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

The hotel on the Italian Riviera is full of women. The plot is revolves around everyday occurences and recreates the stifling atmosphere of a drawing room, where too much and too little is said.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Italy, British Literature, Novels, Ireland

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

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

[Fionnuala]

A Room with a View was very much in my mind as I read this early work of Elizabeth Bowen's. Like E M Forster's famous story, this one describes the affairs of a group of English tourists staying in a hotel in Italy where some have rooms with views while others have to be content without. As in Forster's scenario, Bowen's 1920s English visitors are very class conscious so there is a lot of emphasis on the position in society of each of the hotel guests and the privileges that go with higher status. These scenes are quite funny, and it is clear that Bowen found them funny too. She also points out, as Forster did, how intolerant her characters are of anyone who is not English — the Italians are deplored by the characters for their laziness and lack of organization. Afternoon tea followed by a game of tennis remains the highlight of everyone's day and it would be easy to forget that these people are not still in England except for Bowen's frequent mentions of the weather and the scenery.

But there were other reasons why I thought of EM Forster. When I finished his Room with a View, I read his novella, The Story of a Panic. It is also set in Italy and concerns yet another group of English tourists who go on an outing in the mountains with a local driver and are overtaken by an electric storm. The charged atmosphere on the mountain proves very unsettling for one of the characters which then has repercussions for the others. A similar situation happens in Bowen's story. The characters find themselves on a steep mountain road when a mist descends and driving becomes dangerous even for their experienced local driver. One of the characters has a moment of panic which eventually influences the lives of the others.

And now that I think of it, E M Forster uses a similar scenario in A Passage to India. The English characters go on a trip to the mountains with a local man and the strange atmosphere causes one of the characters a moment of great panic that changes everyone's lives. And while I'm on the track of English characters abroad, there's also Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out in which there's a climactic trip away from the securities of South American hotel life and up into the mountains. And of course Rowland Mallet from Henry James' Roderick Hudson has his own moment of panic on a Swiss mountain. He's American of course, but he is one of the most English-seeming of HJ's characters.

The similarities in plot got me wondering about the intention behind all these stories. I concluded that this bunch of authors seem determined to pit their insular and finally rather puny characters against the powerful atmosphere and elements of the foreign country. And the foreign country always wins.

[JimZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not fond of this novel. It was my first foray into Elizabeth Bowen’s oeuvre. This is her first novel. I do believe it was favorably received at the time it was published, as well as recently (as you will see from the blogsite reviews I found at the end of this review). Victoria Glendinning wrote a biography of her, and commented about this novel (on the back cover of the Penguin issue), “The Hotel is on every level a very good novel…for a first novel it is extraordinary.” I have a lot of respect for Ms. Glendinning…Victoria Glendinning CBE FRSL is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist; she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. I read her novel, Electricity, way back in 1997 and gave it a ‘B’. I guess I am deviating. I gave this novel, The Hotel, 2 stars and that is that. 😐

I know Elizabeth Bowen writes well. And I know there are novels in which nothing much happens and that is sometimes not a problem…but with this novel I found the prose to be long-winded, and all the characters to be unlikable, and nothing much happened. A bunch of rich people full of themselves take their summer vacation at a hotel on the Italian Riviera. There is also a parson —I don’t know if parsons are rich… don’t think they are supposed to be. One of the rich young women, Sydney Warren, and the parson, James Milton, during the course of their meeting at the hotel become engaged to be married. I think maybe two conversations between them sealed the deal. One would hope that is not the way things are supposed to work…there should be a slightly longer period in which a couple gets to know one another prior to becoming engaged don’t you think? Oh well, far be it for me to criticize but I’ll do it anyway because they can’t come and get me and yell at me for being opinionated. 😐

I have three other novels of hers, but have yet to read them…they are in paperback and have small print. I generally like hardcover books because there’s nothing like holding a hardcover book and the print tends to be a bit bigger. Still if anybody has read Bowen what would you recommend I dive into: The House in Paris (1963, with intro by A.S. Byatt [1976]), The Death of the Heart (1938), or The Last September (1929)? I should also say I have placed a review in one of them from the New York Review of Books in which her collected short stories were very favorably reviewed by a well-respected novelist and writer of short stories Tessa Hadley (Hats One Dreamed About, 2.20.2020). Has anybody read Bowen’s short stories? She has several collections. Sorry for the questions…this is supposed to be a review, not an interrogation.

I have a suspicion that some folks have equated her with the British author, Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). I very much liked a number of her books, and have read all but one of her novels (one I have not read yet is ‘The Wedding Group’). Anyway, in a number of her novels, people that you meet in the novel are saying one thing out loud but thinking oftentimes the exact opposite to themselves. So, in this novel, The Hotel, people are more often than not disingenuous and saying one thing or acting one way and thinking another way (always in a negative fashion). But at least with Elizabeth Taylor there tended to be one or more characters that I was drawn to when reading the novels, unlike this novel. And Taylor’s novels tended to have less verbiage that was superfluous to the telling of the story than in this novel. This is all IMHO of course.

Reviews from blogsites ( quite a few reviews and much more favorable reviews than mine…):
• https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2017...
• https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2017/... This reviewer recommends I read The Death of the Heart (1938) & The Last September…
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2014/... Hmmm, she recommends Death of the Heart & The House in Paris.
• http://cosybooks.blogspot.com/2013/04...
• https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpres...
• https://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2013/...

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes described as a 1920s Jane Austen (bit of a stretch), but I see more likeness to Anita Brookner. Relatively light, character rather than plot-driven, but some intriguing and well observed social insights and very unexpected metaphors. One or two grating phrases, but far more brilliant ones.

Upper middle class Brits staying in a Mediterranean hotel. A little confusing at first when you encounter Mrs X and Jane, but don't immediately realise or remember that they are one and the same.

[Antoinette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen is an author I have always meant to read,so I am glad I have finally read one of her novels. This is the first novel she wrote. It was very well written and very captivating.

This book is set on the Italian Riviera in the 1920’s. we are at the Hotel of the title. All the guests are British. I met so many characters initially, I felt the need to write down their names to keep them straight.

There is no real plot in this book. It is a book about people staying with their own kind in a foreign country. They are there to get away but do they really get away? They get to know one another, they gossip about each other, some are thought highly of, some not so much. There are lots of interactions. Their days are so routine- they have their meals, including afternoon tea, they go for walks, they play tennis, they hang out in the lounge. To be in Italy and to be cloistered in or by your hotel seems rather restrictive to me. But that’s how they all liked it!

The character that comes to focus more sharply is Sydney Warren, a young woman who is there with her cousin. She meets the middle aged glamorous Mrs. Kerr, a widow. She falls under her spell and feels cast aside when Mrs. Kerr’s son, Ronald arrives. There is a lot of underlying subtlety in Bowen’s writing. It is a book that I needed to pay close attention to as I was reading. I was left wondering about many of the people I met- when the “season” ends and they all go back to their own unshared lives. What will they remember of this time away?

This book reminded me of Forester’s A Room With a View, but less romantic and dream like. I look forward to exploring more books by Elizabeth Bowen.

Published: 1927

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This Hotel," said Eileen, "seems to be producing brides in very large quantities. What a pity we have used up all the men!"

Elizabeth Bowen's first novel feels like a slightly undercooked debut but, at the same time, shows all the skills, in embryo, that she makes her own in her later fiction: the astute and penetrating eye for both foibles and hidden emotions, the lyrical, double-faced writing where what is said on the surface can be probed for further, deeper meanings (in the quotation above, for example, the 'used up' men could equally apply to the impact of WW1), the sly and often scathing humour, the deep interest in relations between people.

Here the humour is generally aimed at the insular, wealthy English inhabitants of an Italian hotel. They stick together and more or less ignore locals and anything too 'foreign' while complaining about the 'careless' staff and the fact that one woman who came down to lunch late was forced to eat macaroni from the staff's lunch! But Bowen is never crude: the annoying Lee-Mittisons, for example, are exposed to ridicule but there's also compassion in the way Mrs L-M is shown propping up her husband's vulnerable ego and at-risk sense of self-importance.

At the heart of the book is the slightly disreputable Mrs Kerr and twenty-two year old Sydney who is intelligent but somewhat adrift - not quite a 1920s 'New Woman' but not part of the older generation's value system either. She's quite a prototype for other young women in Bowen's work, struggling to find a place in the world and a mooring for their wayward emotions.

The beginning feels like a series of vignettes so readers have to be patient till the strands start to wind together. Not the place to start with Bowen but an interesting read for anyone wanting to trace her development towards the brilliancy of the later books.

[BrokenTune · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5* - Blergh.

She did not want to go down to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs Kerr sat on here, watching her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.
‘I have heard so much of your service. Today I am really going to watch it.’
‘This is one of my off days.’ ‘
Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.’ Mrs Kerr laughed. ‘I’m unlucky.’
‘Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit anything.’
‘What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney! How terribly sinister! It had never occurred to me that my eye might be evil. I meant something much more prosaic – that I happen to miss things.’

Well, I somewhat sympathise with Mrs. Kerr. I, too, miss things, and one of things I have missed was the point of this book. I have heard so much praise of Bowen's work that reading her first novel was a huge let down.

I first read about the The Hotel in connection with the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. When reading up on the history of the trial and the ban of the book in the UK, some of the sources cite other books published in 1928 which also are attributed with a lesbian theme. Anyway, one of the articles referred to The Hotel not being considered for censorship because it was too "reticent".

Reticent, indeed. I had no expectations (or indeed any particular wish) to read about any romantic entanglements between the main characters, but I did expect the book to have story or a point but it seems that even these eluded me.

The Hotel is about a group of English tourists (mostly women) who holiday in a hotel in Italy. There is a group of older women, a few younger ones and the two main characters - Mrs. Kerr and Sydney. The tourists basically provide the soundboard of conventional upper-middle class society against which Mrs Kerr and Sydney develop their friendship, though Mrs Kerr is characterised so ambiguously that it is difficult to say whether she is one of the old "conventionals" or not.

Anyway, so during the holiday, Sydney meets Mrs Kerr and the two become friends and somewhat abstain from mingling with the rest of the guests. Their friendship is somewhat disrupted, however, when Mrs Kerr's son arrives at the hotel and one of the other guests, a clergyman, falls in love with Sydney and proposes to her. She refuses, then accepts, then breaks it off. Then guest start to depart.

Really, there is not much of a story.

What was more aggravating than the non-story was the writing. Yes, there were some great paragraphs, one my favourites being:

"On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be enough to awake one in terror."

However, they were so few embedded in so much pretentious drivel that just would not come to any point.

‘There are situations in life,’ said Mrs Pinkerton, ‘face to face with which one is powerless.’ Though she only meant that in the struggle for life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility.


The only character that made me finish the book was Sydney, who is a straight forward sensible character.

‘Doesn’t it rain? I like it!’ she was moved to exclaim. ‘If I were Monet and alive now, I would paint this and present the picture to the P.L.M. as a poster for the Côte d’Azur.’ She smiled out at the rain with an air of complicity.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

”An hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.”
“Mustn’t that be,” said Ronald, “what people come out for?”
“Perhaps some—”

“But are there really people who would do that?” asked Ronald sharply, in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. “You mean women?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Milton…

The Hotel is Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, published in 1927, the same year that Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse. While the two books’ concerns are rather different—Woolf is concerned with family life and its changes and various estrangements in a new era, while Bowen is concerned with Brits abroad in the Italian Riviera while their world at home is falling apart—they way they approach things is eerily similar. Both have a New Woman figure at their center (Lily Briscoe in Lighthouse and Sydney Warren in The Hotel); both of these women express admiration for older women of the previous generation in covert homoerotic tones, while also being adamant in their desires to break free from the constraints of the older, pre-War world that was still so steeped in Victorian norms.



Maud Ellmann says that “as a first novel [The Hotel] is astonishing.” And it is: the social banter of The Last September is here, coupled with a melancholy for a world that will soon collapse into an ineffable unknown; the deep interiority and psychological explorations in other novels like The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day; and the playfulness mixed with droll seriousness that one finds scattered in the best of Bowen’s short stories. Truly a 5-star book, had this been written by anyone other than Bowen, the weaknesses are perhaps overlooked easily given this is her first novel; however, it’s hard to believe that this is a first novel at all, given what control Bowen has here, and how far-ranging her insights. A novel about women’s friendships and alliances while in solitude or in the enforced company of men, The Hotel dips into gender politics more deeply than To the Lighthouse does, but, as a first novel, it lacks the emotive symbolism and skilled technique that Woolf employs; indeed, at times, Bowen’s fictional hotel is so far removed from Britain and the action that’s taking place there, that one can’t help but feel that the characters exist in a bubble and that there is nothing whatever going on in the world at large—unless, of course, this was her intent.



Bowen said that she liked the idea of a hotel as a place to cage her characters, to force them into interactions with each other, to set the stage for different social classes to engage with each other, and to elicit quiet scenes of drama, passion, repression, and even rebellion that might not otherwise have occurred. The scenery of the Riviera is evoked exceedingly well, and this book is perhaps an excellent primer for those who find later Bowen to be often tediously difficult, with her deep interior plumbing of characters and her often idiosyncratic and disarming way of phrasing sentences that causes the reader to question events just as much as her characters do.

 While The Hotel seems to owe more to Woolf than to James, Bowen's later work is a true synthesis of her own style that shows her debt to both literary figures, but is more Jamesian in its scope and concentration.

This new edition, published by University of Chicago Press (who also reprinted Bowen’s third novel, Friends and Relations) is a beautiful edition indeed; Ellmann’s introduction situations The Hotel within Bowen’s oeuvre and there really is no better critic today writing on Bowen’s singular work.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the surface this should be the kind of book I hate, a bunch of posh types swanning around in the sun on the Italian Riviera but there’s a lot more going on between the lines. I found myself rereading certain sentences or paragraphs, smiling at clever word choices. This is Elizabeth Bowens first novel published in 1927. It has an undercurrent of the world changing, the roles of women and their expectations, there’s a postwar atmosphere and there’s also a malaise, the young women planning to get married because that’s what you’re supposed to do and any man will do. So this was an enjoyable read with more going on than appears.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1927 this is the first published novel by Elizabeth Bowen. As such, it is not quite as formed as later novels, but many of Bowen's trademarks are already in place. This is character driven, revolving around a group of British tourists on the Italian riviera. Like so many of her later works, her main characters come from the wealthy, upper classes. Those who can afford to winter in the sun and who live very much as though they are still in England. Siestas are definitely a no-no and even sitting aimlessly on your balcony, without any needlework or worthy distraction, is seen as rather eccentric.

Into this group of residents, Bowen aims her lenses as they play tennis, walk in the hills, eat pastries, gossip, bicker and try to match-make. Central characters include Mrs Kerr, who befriends the intelligent Sydney, and is later visited by her son, Ronald. Both Mrs Kerr and Sydney Warren are topics of conversation as they are not typical of the other ladies and are viewed with suspicion. There is Veronica Lawrence and her sisters, pretty and conventional. Young and aimless Victor Ammering, the dull Mr Lee-Mittison and his wife, who secretly does all she can to make her ungrateful husband's life run smoothly and the Rev. James Milton, who causes uproar when he first arrives and uses a bathroom reserved for the sole use of the Hon Mrs and Miss Pinkerton.

If you enjoy novels which rush along at a fast clip, with lots of action, then stay away from this one. If you are happy to meander along with Sydney as she is viewed askance for being overly clever, while debating on who she likes, if anyone, confused and annoyed at herself and everyone else, then pick this up. Beautifully written, Bowen skews her characters brilliantly. Within a few lines, you see these people clearly and know who they are and what they think. The frustrated Colonel, whose wife resents his interest in the young ladies, the older women gossiping together, the deferral to the gentlemen who try to fix the lift, even though they obviously have no idea what they are looking at and simply wander off again. This is a portrait of a class, a place, a period, a time, with those values and insecurities. If you like Bowen, you will love this. If you haven't read her, this is probably not the best place to start, but it is still a very enjoyable read.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in April 2016 I read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, a brilliant book that made my end-of-year highlights. First published in 1927, The Hotel was Bowen’s first novel. It’s a striking debut, a story of unsuitable attachments and the subtle dynamics at play among the members of a very privileged set, all cast against the backdrop of the Italian Riviera in the 1920s.

In many ways, the novel revolves around Sydney Warren, a somewhat remote yet spirited young woman in her early twenties. Sydney has come to the hotel to accompany her older cousin, Tessa Bellamy, who in turn is trying to deal with a gastric condition. Sydney’s family are delighted that she has travelled to Italy with Tessa, viewing it is an ‘inspired solution of the Sydney problem’, in their eyes something to counterbalance the girl’s leaning towards the neurotic and her tendency to be ‘so unfortunate in her choice of friends’. For her part, Sydney has developed a rather unhealthy attachment to another resident, Mrs Kerr, an intriguing, self-assured woman in her forties. While Mrs Kerr is a widow, she appears to act more like a divorcee; at least that’s the opinion of several of the other guests at the hotel who seem enjoy speculating about Mrs Kerr and the nature of her relationship with Sydney. I love this next quote, a passage of dialogue so indicative of Bowen’s penetrating tone. In this scene, Tessa is in conversation with several other ladies in the hotel drawing-room.

Tessa continued: ‘Sydney is very affectionate.’

‘She is very much…absorbed, isn’t she, by Mrs Kerr?’

‘I have known other cases,’ said somebody else, looking about vaguely for her scissors, ‘of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel those others were quite healthy.’

‘I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an older woman. It is never the best women who have these strong influences. I would far rather she lost her head about a man.’

‘Sydney hasn’t lost her head,’ said little Tessa with dignity.

‘Oh but, Mrs Bellamy – I was talking about other cases.’ (p. 62)

And so the discussion continues in a similar vein.

Other notable guests at the hotel include Mr and Mrs Lee-Mittison, the Ammerings and their son Victor and the Lawrence girls, Veronica, Eileen and Joan. Mr Lee-Mittison is determined to surround himself with the beautiful, refined young people, and there are some classic scenes involving a picnic he attempts to orchestrate with mixed results. While the Lee-Mittisons are very happy for Sydney and the Lawrence sisters to attend, they are none too pleased when Victor Ammering shows up on the scene, much to Veronica Lawrence’s amusement when she goes off with the young man. For her part, Mrs L-M, a devoted wife, will do anything she can to ensure her husband’s social events are a success. It’s all quite amusing to observe.

Also staying at the hotel are Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, genteel elderly ladies very much of the type depicted in Fawlty Towers, and two sisters-in-law, the Honourable Mrs and Miss Pinkerton, who have paid extra to have exclusive use of the bathroom opposite their rooms. When middle-aged clergyman James Milton arrives at the hotel following a long train journey across the continent, unaware of the bathroom arrangements he goes for a long soak in the Pinkertons’ bath, much to the consternation of the ladies on his floor.

James Milton’s appearance on the scene shakes things up a little in more ways than one. In the hope of attracting Sydney, he rushes out a terribly ill-judged proposal of marriage to her during a walk in the countryside (there is a sense that he is comfortable operating within his own relatively small circle of society, but much less so in this wider sphere). Sydney declines, giving James the impression that there is no point in his holding out any hope of a change in heart; but then the situation changes once again with another arrival, that of Ronald, Mrs Kerr’s twenty-year-old son. Before long, Sydney realises that Mrs Kerr has given her the brush off in favour of Ronald, a fact that becomes painfully clear to her during a conversation with Veronica Lawrence. Once again, Bowen demonstrates great insight and precision in painting this scene; here’s a brief extract from the extended discussion between these two girls.

‘Well, she has so absolutely given you the go-by, hasn’t she?’ said Veronica, replacing the alabaster lid of the powder-bowl, then looking down to blow some powder off her dress. ‘It was “Sydney this” and “Sydney darling that” and “Where’s Sydney?” and “Sydney and I are going together,” and now he’s come she simply doesn’t see you.’

Sydney, after an interval, leant sideways to push the window farther open. She seemed to have forgotten Veronica, who energetically continued: Of course I’m sorry for you. Everybody’s sorry for you.’

‘Oh,’ said Sydney.

‘Do you mind the way she’s going on?” asked Veronica curiously.

‘It hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything to mind,’ said Sydney with a high-pitched little laugh and a sensation of pushing off something that was coming down on her like the ceiling in one of her dreams. It seemed incredible that the words Veronica had just made use of should ever have been spoken. (p. 117)

In a rebound response to being sidelined by Mrs Kerr, Sydney agrees to marry James Milton, a development also prompted, at least to a certain extent, by Veronica’s attitude towards marriage. In many ways, Veronica sees marriage to a man as an inevitable outcome for a woman in her position – so if she has to marry someone it may as well be Victor Ammering, to whom she has just become engaged.

To read the rest of my review, please click here:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2017...

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was wanting to love her -- lesbian! Early 20th-century! Something of a classic. But this took me FOREVER to get through. I was bored, and yet it was completely up my alley: sea resort hotel populated by upper-middle class British people. Comedy of manners. But not so funny or interesting, alas.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowen's first novel is so evocative of other writers - E. M. Forster came first to mind, given the setting of upper class English vacationers in an Italian pensione (A Room with a View) and a fraught situation in which a car perches dangerously on a curvy mountain road (something similar happens in Where Angels Fear to Tread) and one of its occupants hopes it will go over the cliff. There are also hints of Henry James, and Virginia Woolf (The Voyage Out).

Bowen brilliantly captures a certain type of middle-aged married man who loves to be among pretty young girls:

The departure, always a fidgety piece of organization, had gone off magnificently with never a hitch, and he looked with satisfaction at the five girls with their short skirts and neat ankles walking in front of him. No one could have been less of a horrid old satyr than Mr. Lee-Mittison, but he loved to surround himself with bright faces, and the faces of young women are admittedly the brightest.

He knew himself to be a success with young people: he could spin yarns and imitate animals by the hour, and tell graphically of life in the East, bearing his descriptions out with photograph albums. He found that he need never want for young society; girls seemed to take to him naturally. He did not care for young married women, while widows depressed him – poor little souls.

While Colonel Duperrier's wife is off being miserable somewhere, he hangs out in the hotel lobby with the Lawrence daughters:

He drew up a chair and sat not far away from her while she scribbled experimentally with the new pen. It gave him a restful, anchored feeling to sit beside somebody who was doing something. He looked at the back of Joan’s neck, from which the cropped hair fell away, with uncovetous appreciation. What he believed himself to be feeling was that it would have been jolly to have had a daughter. If Colonel Duperrier’s wife were to die, he would marry some girl of twenty-three who would be very much in love with him and with whom he would be very happy. Colonel Duperrier had never thought of this, but it was evident to any woman.

Not just a daughter: The declining sun made the girls' arms and faces coral-pink and their dresses gold; Colonel Duperrier regretted more than ever that he had no nieces.

It's not only the men whose minds are wandering:

Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who was not otherwise immodest, often married herself imaginatively to men she took an interest in, then reviewed the possibilities of such a union. 'I would do something for his hair at the back,' she thought. 'I am certain that is accidental baldness, not hereditary.'

I'm going to let the novel sit for a bit and then reread it in order to better absorb the subtleties of the "sapphic" friendship simmering between Sydney Warren and Mrs. Kerr.

[Lady Drinkwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the beginning I couldnt quite work out what this book was really about. It was like Enchanted April without the enchantment and Room with a View with lots of Rooms in the Hotel and views of Italy but no passion. However about half way through I became absolutely intrigued by this novel and by Sydney, the complicated central character. There are lots of interesting reflections on time, on seizing the day and the sorts of relationship that can help us get through life, all taking place in the Italian countryside. Strangely there is almost no mention of any Italians. It all feels a little unreal, these little Englanders put together in a hotel for the holiday and hardly venturing out. Its a strange book, with quite a few relationships and things that are never fully explained, and the writing is very dense at times but beautiful I found. There is one scene in a river valley which is completely stuck in my head and haunting me. It was altogether very enjoyable and to my taste.

[Karin · Rating 1 out of 5]

My, my, but a rather disappointing read. There was one scene I found rather amusing, but on the whole, nothing really happens, it's hard to like any of the characters and if this is what it was like to be a wealthy British citizen in the late 1920s, post-Great War, then I for one am glad I wasn't part of it. Now Bowen must be able to write better, since her Collected Stories is on the Bloom's Canon, but it's not likely I will be reading that after this experience.

I can see why I wasn't able to get it through my library network, and ended up buying a used copy which is a discarded library copy that is in excellent condition, printed in 1972. I bought and finished it for a discussion, and I am quite thrilled that I am finished with this book.

[Emmy B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting, at time challenging, read. On the one hand, it was really very beautifully written. On the other hand, for the most part, I was pretty sure I didn't get a word of it. By the end, I began to slowly see the light, but even so I wasn't sure and I had to look up several academic analyses of the work to see how it matched up to my own interpretation. This isn't, in itself, a bad thing. But it did impede my complete enjoyment of it. Even now, I feel like I have a lot of questions about what happened here. This might be a good pick for a book club - so much to discuss!

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s amazing when you read The Hotel to think this is a first novel. How was she so accomplished? How did she achieve, as Peter Ackroyd asks, “the munificence of detail, the fine closeness of the atmosphere which she creates?”
I won’t disagree but will put forward that with all the astonishing skill she obviously displays in The Hotel, I did find some paragraphs almost impenetrable. Yes you can get to the bottom of what she means but they were a little exhausting and made for a very slow reading of the book:
“James Milton’s attempt to come farther into her life, to regions by his acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future. But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity. He did not acknowledge finality anywhere; this made him leisurely-seeming and easily generous. His impulses in any direction were not intensified by her own sense of urgency. In the light shed serenely down from that ultimate spaciousness he was covering life at an equable space. He presented himself an undriven, a comforting figure. She saw him conducting a funeral: voluminous, fluttering, milk-white, leaning like one of these angels over the yawn of a grave to scatter his handful of earth, his tribute to mortality; with the expression, a submerged beam, of this having in a cognizant Mind its order. The word “death” used in his presence would have a slow-dying ring to it, to which one would be able to feel him subconsciously listening. She contemplated with a faint inclination a life shared with someone for whom it would have this overtone of significance.”
Phew! Glad that’s over. You can see why it took me quite a while to read this book. On the other hand you have paragraphs like this one:
“It was another of those idyllic evenings, agonisingly meaningless: the evening air brought out the scent of lemons. The Lawrences, shrugging up their wraps round their shoulders, slid forward in their chairs luxuriously and sank down into themselves like cat into their fur. Thin blue smoke drifted away through the clearness....”
And you see that’s why I am glad I read The Hotel - for paragraphs such as this one. Recommended but not for the fainthearted.

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

It seems to me that in this, her first novel, Bowen so much wanted to out-james Henry James that she ruined a potentially good story. When the book starts, young Sydney Warren has been staying on the Riviera with a benign older cousin for some weeks. In their hotel, she is supposed to have developed an "unhealthy" attachment to a beautiful widow, Mrs. Kerr. But we never see how that relationship evolved, nor how Mrs Kerr misled Sydney or toyed with her affections, if that's what she did. But all of a sudden, Mrs Kerr's son Ronald joins his mother, and Mrs Kerr doesn't seem keen to introduce the young people to each other. Sydney is supposed to feel "slighted' or something. Another recent arrival at the hotel, a kind clergyman, proposes to Sydney, to be first turned down, then accepted, then rejected again. Mrs Kerr tells her son she's very sorry for Milton. I guess the reader is supposed to feel that this is the opposite of the truth, and that Mrs Kerr is a sinister woman, like Mrs Merle or other malevolent Henry James characters. However, Bowen's depiction of Mrs Kerr has been so indirect that I'm tempted to take her at her word, for want of proof of her deviousness. At the end of that scene, Mrs Kerr and Sydney exchange damning commentaries on each other, but again in such a way that I don't know what to make of them. I do think that Sydney has behaved atrociously towards Milton, and can't really blame Mrs Kerr for her selfish behavior. Either Bowen hasn't succeeded in her delineation of Sydney's character, or Sydney is just a self-absorbed brat, which would call into question the whole plot. Secondary characters and set pieces like picnics and outings involving numerous hotel guests are quite well done, but ultimately I felt baffled and frustrated with the crucial elements of the book.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent novel by Elizabeth Bowen. The main gist of the book is commentary on the British upper-class society and it's prejudices and problems caused by this. The story is about British travelers who are staying in a hotel on the Italian coast and their interactions.

The characters are well-drawn, with both men and women equally well portrayed. There is romance, friendship, and much more going on in the book, and it will keep you reading. Bowen's style is lovely, and her descriptions often make one feel as though one is right there with her in the beauty of the Italian coast, with its hills, olive trees, flowers, and more. I know my friends who enjoy romantic stories that are more than just romance or, as it were, "chick-lit", will like this one a lot.

[Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry to say that I didn't enjoy this book very much at all until after I'd finished it and then read what other people have written about it, only to discover it's seething with Lesbianism. I thought there was something I was missing. Apparently, though 1927 was a banner year for lesbian literature (viz. The Well of Loneliness), the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name really has a hard time pronouncing itself in this extremely opaque novel. Now I'll have to read it again, demmit. Darlings, you'll enjoy the book much more if you just keep in mind going in that Sydney's a Secret Sapphist. I know I would have.

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bogged down in this one. Couldn't get interested in the characters. Didn't finish.

[Sharon Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished this most unsatisfactory novel. Actually, I can't remember now why I wanted to read it - it must have cropped up in another "read" somewhere. However, the reason it intrigued me was that it was hyped as a novel with delicate undertones of things going on between people beneath their superficial daily interactions. I wish this was true. In fact, I found Bowen's writing so opaque that I often had no idea what was going on!

The novel centres on a bunch of English tourists, mainly women, staying at leisure in a resort hotel on the Italian Riviera. It opens, promisingly enough, with a stand-off between a Miss Pym and a Miss Fitzgerald, who have obviously had an argument or at least some kind of awkward moment, but their situation is not resolved until the very last page of the book! Other meetings and events follow, but I had a curious sense of waiting - through the entire book, actually - for some resolution, something to actually happen, so that people were changed by their conversations and interactions. Instead, it seemed to me that one vague thread of dialogue was followed or interrupted by a lengthy and superfluous description of the state of the sea or sky or a clump of trees. (At one point, Bowen describes a clear, cloudless sky - but with no sun. Go figure.)

Okay - there is a bit of action. Sydney, an insecure young girl with a promisingly unconventional streak that never gets anywhere, first rejects, then accepts and finally rejects again, a proposal of marriage from an older man, a clergyman. Yet I never believed in either the attraction between the two or the disappointment and unhappiness of the clergyman at his rejection. In fact, I couldn't feel the characters at all. Sometimes a writer can make you practically reach out and touch them - not this writer.

Sydney is supposed to be suffering an "unhealthy" attachment to a Mrs Kerr, who is one of those ultra-worldly types native to hotels on the Riviera, but there is no sense of this attachment coming from either Mrs Kerr or Sydney - only a bit of reported gossip from the other ladies and one or two other vague indications in the text. If these are meant to indicate a "crush", "romantic friendship", etc, it was way too subtle for me.

I think my main criticism of this book would have to be what (again, for me - sorry to anyone else who enjoyed it) struck me as its pallor: pastel, undefined people, situations and places; perhaps an attempt at subtlety that just didn't come off. The American poet, May Sarton, who knew Bowen, disliked her style, calling it "mannered". I agree. I would add opaque, vague, at times incomprehensible, but above all, boring.

[Bonnie Morse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just the sort of story I like, especially in summer. It's short yet almost lazy, wandering about the hotel and surrounding Italian countryside at a genteel English pace, introducing the reader to people of all kinds who do very little in their genteel English way. I can't say what it's about, precisely, as it doesn't seem to have a lot in the way of messages or even a point it wants to make. It's just a certain type of person in a certain type of hotel, behaving as such people do in such places. Were one ever to have been one of those people, the book might be something more--flattering, insulting, offensive, even, depending on the reader. Now it's a glimpse back in time to a place and a way of life--or rather several ways of life--that have long since vanished. Be that good, bad, or irrelevant, it is a pleasure to read about. Especially in the hands of Ms. Bowen, whose ability to turn a phrase in dialogue and narration is nearly unmatched.

Despite being totally different stories in nearly every way--beyond technically involving young women (some in their teens) and older women who look after them--it somehow puts me in mind of Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is one of the few books that can compare to it in pure reading pleasure.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowen knew her world was on a precipice, and that all had their eyes tightly shut. Her characters live for the sudden flashes of insight, but are too coiled up and tightly self-restrained to say much about it. Their world is plush with repression and leavened with material opulence and disappointment. Bowen does feelings like no other. This is no The Last September or The Heat of the Day, but you know what? We all have to start somewhere!

This is Elizabeth Bowen's somewhere. It is as excruciatingly delicate as it is breezy, narratively speaking. Here's the twist: not will they or won't they, but why on earth would they ever?! Don't expect to speed read this one, however.

A word about the edition: I'm not sure who edited the text proper, but the University of Chicago edition is plagued by typos. Multiple "freinds" and the like. It felt more than a little shabby, although Maud Ellmann's introduction more than compensates.

[Celia T · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is impenetrable in a way that I think is peculiar to a certain kind of British writing in the 1920s. I don't mean impenetrable in an experimental, modernist, stream-of-consciousness kind of a way, because as far as form and structure goes it's fairly traditional. I mean it's the type of book that makes you feel like you've been invited to a party where you don't know anyone, and they all have a complicated pre-established ecolect that you can't follow at all, and everyone has secrets that you're not privy to but that they keep dropping dark hints about, and nobody ever says exactly what they mean when they speak. That can be charming when done right, but it can also be a little exhausting. Bowen obviously uses similar techniques to great effect in The House in Paris, where you're supposed to feel that sense of exclusion and confusion alongside the children. Here, I dunno, it kind of started to grate on me after a while.

TL;DR a bunch of rich people are staying at a hotel on the Riviera. some of them are lesbians. everyone has a lot of feelings, but represses them. then they all go home. the end

[JoAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually love character-driven novels and the idea of a group of characters in a closed setting (a hotel on the Italian Riviera in the 1920's in this case) sounds especially appealing. But for such a short book, The Hotel took me an awfully long time to read.

The Hotel is not a novel to read for the story; there is actually very little in the way of plot. It's all about relationships - some existing, but most are new. It is well-written and perceptive, but it's also cold... distant, chilly, perhaps even clinical. Bowen seems to feel no warmth toward her characters, and as a result, I felt none either. Whenever I put the book down, there was never a hurry to pick it up again.

I read The House in Paris several years ago and, while I liked it better than The Hotel, the same coolness was present and it was also a very slow read. I wonder if this is true for all of Bowen's novels.

I hate to say it, but the cover was my favorite part of this book.


Bottom line:
The Hotel is beautifully written and insightful, but somewhat cold and not especially compelling.

[Mary Durrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book so evocative of the era of the 1920's.
Set on the Italian Riviera, a cast of characters who are staying in the hotel.
The bathroom scene was so funny and typical of a time before en-suites!
I loved it!

[❀⊱RoryReads⊰❀ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did Not Finish at 40%.

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Bowen reminds me here of Patrick White, with this portrait of genteel 1920s hotel guests flittering atop a social veneer as fragile as porcelain while all sorts of half-formed emotions and desires, unnamed and unknowable, seethe underneath.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

… the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on. Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel its way, cool-fingered, from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or constrained, time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining-room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, has been sedulously barred away …

I don't think I've ever loved an author who's this difficult this much.

Difficult as in overcomplicated, overly-ambitious, circuitous; annoying, not tedious. Elizabeth Bowen writes in the tradition of Austen, of Henry James, of Thackeray, but she writes in the era of Waugh, Forster, Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West. And while I've given this three stars, it's not so much for the work's accomplishments as it is for the vision, the white-knuckle-restrained execution, the absolute refusal to go along to get along.

Bowen's Hotel want to be a kind of Jamesian "innocents-abroad meet unforeseen-complexity" outing, meant for the boxing-out of mutually antagonistic worldviews, the interplay of thoughts-withheld vs views-expressed--you know-- the old verbal dagger and drawing room wit circuit. It also comes very near to Forster with the "Larky Holiday Outing Goes Dark And Scary-Vertiginous" structure over time. Italian Riviera, Brit expats. Complete with wiser, older Grand Matrons who stand by and comment for depthy reinforcement.

But this is Bowen's first book, and in spite of her courageous efforts to be obtuse, counter-customary and incisive-- no bell is rung, the effort is massive but the effect scatters itself. Unlike her major opuses, The House In Paris and The Last September, our Hotel denizens are never unpacked enough, the structuring weighs down the pace and cohesion. She misses that 'congruity' in James, where as we meet and become familiar with our characters, a shift takes place, toward an accelerated meshing of the narrative cogs. Producing, yes, pace. Direction.

Young Elizabeth Bowen wants it all right off the jump. She uses lots of oblique, vaguely cubist narrative angles on the story, breaking without notice into what today we'd recognize as Rashomon structure, but doesn't manage to circle in on a bright line or direction. Quite so much. (It should be said she's made it difficult for herself, in choosing a heroine who is in the tormented stages of early womanhood, juiced with emotion, uncertainty and rebelliousness on a hair trigger as her literate protagonist. Bright fireworks without and within yes, firm ground for a story, well, difficult.)

"Do you remember the Decameron lady who fished in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?"
"Husband's shares were not good in those days," he said tolerantly. "I ought by the way to re-read my Decameron."
"Wouldn't it be nice," she said, suddenly smiling, "if the Saracens were to appear on the skyline, land and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted--down there--that there aren't any more Saracens, but for all we know they may only be in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. "But I wonder," she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, "how many of us they would really care to take away?"
He did not know how she wished him to answer, and risked: "It would be an embarrassing choice."
She sighed flatly.

In the end, it all winds up in a poisonous revision of an Austen gallivant: the thorny briar path of Betrothal. For students of Bowen this is an indispensable outing. For the same sort of excursion by a more advanced practitioner, try booking a Passage To India.

[Maire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quiet book. There is definitely still some plot action, but mostly Bowen chooses to focus on developing the interior thoughts of the main characters. I turn to a Bowen book when I want beautifully constructed sentences, thoughtful interior monologues (and dialogues too) that just always hit the nail on the head, and an exquisite sense of place and time. However, these qualities just do not lend themselves to a speedy read. Each chapter and page is meant to be read slowly and inquisitively. This book was a perfect way for me to slow down after reading a few mystery books that I was able to just page right through.

The basic plot centers around a group of English tourists all staying in the same Italian hotel for a summer around the turn of the century. We follow them throughout their day as a few mini-dramas occur. There are one or two characters that you get to know very well. While they can both seem extremely annoying if you just knew about their actions and how other people perceive them, once you "get inside their heads," you start to really understand them. There were definitely moments where I thought, "Yes, exactly!" after reading a section.

I would recommend this to someone looking for a slow, thoughtful read.