Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin to parents of the upper-middle class Anglo-Irish gentry – a class identity that she would infuse into her works time and time again. She spent her early childhood between Dublin and her family home “Bowen’s Court” in Kildorrery, County Cork, where she spent her summers. In 1905, after her father began to suffer from mental illness, Bowen moved to Kent, England with her mother, where she would remain after her mother’s death in 1912. 

Bowen published her first work – a volume of short stories entitled Encounters – in 1923, the same year she married her husband Alan Charles Cameron. Living in Oxford with her husband, Bowen continued writing short stories, releasing three further volumes and publishing the first of her novels: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931) and To the North (1932). After the publication of To the North, Bowen moved to London, where she became a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and wrote The House in Paris (1936) and The Death of the Heart (1938). 

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Bowen continued her literary career whilst working as an air raid warden and for the British Ministry of Information, where she reported on Irish opinion and the policy of neutrality. During this time she most notably published The Demon Lover (1945) and The Heat of the Day (1948) and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). 

Bowen received honorary doctorates from both Dublin and Oxford University, and in 1965 was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. She continued writing well into her later years, and the final novel to be published while she was still alive, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Bowen died of lung cancer in Kent in 1973, and was buried alongside her husband in Co. Cork, beside the site of Bowen’s Court.