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“... Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were required to adopt forced them along paths which were not familiar to them, and often not ...”

“... in Britain. Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Francis Wyndham all praised him, as did Elizabeth Bowen, who described In Love as a ‘little masterpiece’. One by one his books fell out of print, until the reissue last year of In Love, My Face for the World to See and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (and in the US a few years earlier by New York ...”

“... wrote the story after he had been in Berlin with Harold Nicolson, and it was reprinted in 1937 by Elizabeth Bowen in the Faber Book of Short Stories. I would unhesitatingly say that it is far better, more unforgettable, than anything by the two Jacks, but it hardly matters who wrote it, and its author will no doubt disappear from public view before they ...”

“... whim, just as the events of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas are cast in a perpetual autumnal haze (as Elizabeth Bowen noted), in defiance of the usual arrangement of the seasons. Anglo-Irish disdain for the tedious requirements of naturalism? Certainly a moral pattern takes precedence over verisimilitude, in Irish fiction of the last century, and it’s ...”

“... believes that in all her favourite work of the period – and that stretches to the writings of Elizabeth Bowen and to Peter Grimes, the opera with which Benjamin Britten returned from the States to England in 1942 – we encounter sensibilities thoroughly au fait with European modernism who nonetheless adopted the passion for the particular that is ...”

“... a naval vessel”, with all the guns run out’; perhaps more tellingly, a character in an Elizabeth Bowen novel based partly on Bowra is said, when entering a room, to be always ‘delighted to see himself’. He spoke with a booming voice, which got louder as he got deafer: ‘He really ought to be fitted with a silencer,’ one friend ...”

“... of the canon, and wondered, to take one example, why Brendan Behan should be preferred over Elizabeth Bowen. Maybe Bowen wouldn’t look right on a pub wall. She seems to be not just the wrong gender but also the wrong class, the wrong religion. This sense of wrongness doesn’t adhere to ...”

“... look at the work of certain women writers – Eva Gore Booth, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, each of whom has her own chapter – and how they dealt with same-sex love. Some of these women were, as far as we know, gay; others were not. The issues are clearer in other essays – in Éibhear Walshe’s piece on ...”

“... people at home and abroad. Yet neither is considered to be a novelist in the sense that, say, Elizabeth Bowen is. Her novel of 1929, The Last September, is also a lament for a vanishing class, that of the highly privileged Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In describing the three novels of those two years in this way – as chronicles of disaster – we blur ...”

“... has called the effect ‘restrained’). It’s modern without being Modernist, exactly. It has Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann in it, and Patrick Hamilton, and Denton Welch. The language is rich in period detail, not locked up for best in the china cabinet, but out there among the everyday cups and saucers, working hard: ‘You nit’, ‘Little ...”

“... like a nightmare, hotted-up Lady Colefax.’ Then this: ‘a three-cornered conversation with Elizabeth [Bowen] on the awfulness of women writers and the nastiness of her friend Mrs Woolf’. ‘There is something wrong with a world in which one meets Mrs Lowinsky and Roger Hinks and Mrs Royde-Smith. They smell of ...”

“... was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the ...”

“... by the petite bourgeoisie (Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot)? I don’t think, as Carey does, that Elizabeth Bowen ‘goes beyond’ Henry James (whom Carey doesn’t seem to like) in her ability to depict inner thought and feeling, and I am unable to make sense of his claim that Lucky Jim represents ‘one of the first attempts in English to describe ...”

“... girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on ...”

“... early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective stories.’ Japanese readers would understand quickly that Tokyo Year Zero concerns a real-life serial killer, as notorious there as Peter Sutcliffe ...”