Queer Places:
15 Herbert Pl, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 2, D02 X289, Ireland
Downe House School, Hermitage Rd, Cold Ash, Thatcham RG18 9JJ, UK
Headington House Lodge, 22 Old High St, Oxford OX3 9HN, Regno Unito
2 Clarence Terrace, Marylebone, London NW1 4RD, Regno Unito
Bowen’s Court, Farahy, Co. Cork, Irlanda
Elizabeth Bowen,
CBE (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an
Irish novelist and short story writer. She was part of the Virginia Woolf's
literary circle. Bowen had an affairt with
May
Sarton, during the late 1930s. She had erotically charged relationship
with both Carson McCullers and
Nancy Spain in the 1950s. Never allowing her severe stammer to get in the way of her role as a garrulous hostess, she entertained the likes of
Rosamund Lehman,
Eudora Welty and
Virginia Woolf.
Iris Murdoch attended one of the glittering salons at Bowen’s Court since she was twenty years younger than her hostess and has often been mythologised as something of an honorary man.
The 1920s were boom years for lesbian literature, seeing the publication of a
large range of texts from virulently anti-lesbian works, such as
Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary
Women (1928), through relatively traditional celebrations of romantic
friendship, such as Elizabeth Bowen's
The Hotel (1927), to radical modernist texts with encoded lesbian themes,
such as Virginia Woolf's
Orlando (1928).
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place
in Dublin
and baptised in the nearby
St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents, Henry Charles Cole
Bowen and Florence Colley later brought her to
Bowen's Court at Farahy, near
Kildorrery,
County
Cork, where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in
1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in
Hythe.
After her mother died in 1912 Bowen was brought up by her aunts. She was
educated at
Downe House School under the headship of
Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her
talent lay in writing. She mixed with the
Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with
Rose Macaulay who helped her seek out a publisher for her first book, a
collection of short stories entitled Encounters (1923).
Headington House Lodge, Oxford
Clarence Terrace
In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who
subsequently worked for the
BBC. The marriage
has been described as "a sexless but contented union."[1]
The marriage was reportedly never consummated.[2]
She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with
Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted
over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer
Seán Ó Faoláin and a relationship with the American poet
May
Sarton.[1]
Bowen and her husband first lived near
Oxford,
where they socialized with
Maurice Bowra,
John
Buchan and
Susan Buchan, and where she wrote her early novels, including
The Last September (1929). Following the publication of To the
North (1932) they moved to 2 Clarence Terrace,
Regent's Park,
London,
where she wrote
The House in Paris (1935) and
The Death of the Heart (1938). In 1937, she became a member of the
Irish Academy of Letters.[3]
In 1930 Bowen became the first (and only) woman to inherit Bowen's Court,
but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During
World War II she worked for the British
Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the
issue of
neutrality.[4]
Bowen's political views tended towards
Burkean conservatism.[5][6]
During and after the war she wrote among the greatest expressions of life in
wartime London, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) and
The Heat of the Day (1948); she was awarded the
CBE the same year.
Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, where Alan
Cameron died a few months later. Many writers visited her at Bowen's Court
from 1930 onwards, including
Virginia Woolf,
Eudora Welty,
Carson McCullers,
Iris
Murdoch, and the historian
Veronica Wedgwood. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going,
lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1957 her portrait was painted
at Bowen's Court by her friend, painter
Patrick Hennessy. She travelled to Italy in 1958 to research and prepare
A Time in Rome (1960), but by the following year Bowen was forced to
sell her beloved Bowen's Court, which was demolished in 1960. After spending
some years without a permanent home, Bowen finally settled at "Carbery",
Church Hill,
Hythe,
in 1965.
Her final novel,
Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1968), won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1969 and was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize in 1970. Subsequently, she was a judge (alongside her
friend
Cyril Connolly) that awarded the 1972 Man Booker Prize to
John
Berger for
G. She spent Christmas 1972 at
Kinsale,
County Cork with her friends, Major Stephen Vernon and his wife, Lady
Ursula (daughter of the
Duke of Westminster) but was hospitalised upon her return. Here she was
visited by Connolly, Lady Vernon,
Isaiah Berlin,
Rosamund Lehmann, and her literary agent,
Spencer Curtis Brown, among others.[7]
In 1972 Bowen developed lung cancer. She died in
University College Hospital on 22 February 1973, aged 73. She is buried
with her husband in
Farahy,
County Cork churchyard, close to the gates of Bowen's Court, where there
is a memorial plaque to the author (which bears the words of
John Sparrow) at the entrance to St Colman's Church, where a commemoration
of her life is held annually.[8][9][10]
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