Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life by Patricia Laurence

Abstract

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life by Patricia Laurence Robert Higney (bio) elizabeth bowen: a literary life Patricia Laurence Palgrave Macmillan https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030264147 357 pages; Print, $24.99 Elizabeth Bowen, born in 1899, liked to point out that she was the same age as the century, and across the decades of the twentieth her life and career trace a path as distinctive as any in English-language writing. The only child of an old and fairly respectable Anglo-Irish family, she was the sole inheritor of the Bowens' Big House in southern Ireland, Bowen's Court, and of a provincial aristocratic worldview that, at the time of her birth, was rapidly growing obsolete. She would go on to become friendly with luminaries like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot in 1920s literary Bloomsbury; offset a loving and conventional marriage with a range of love affairs with men and women; serve as a London air-raid warden in the Blitz and occasional spy for Britain in World War II; teach for years in burgeoning postwar American universities, from Princeton to Wisconsin; and be acknowledged upon her death in 1973 as a widely known and respected international woman of letters. Works like The House in Paris (1935) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are full of unarticulated longing, tortuous syntax, Jamesian precision and uncertainty, stylish, striking women and vivid, strange, observant children. Such a life begs for biographical inquiry, and the publication of Patricia Laurence's deeply researched, innovative, and illuminating Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life is a significant event. Bowen loved the impersonal—manners, style, good form—and as Laurence points out in her book's introduction, she was deeply skeptical of biography, viewing it as the signature genre of vulgar personal life. Victoria Glendinning's 1977 Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography, while entertaining and written with warm affection for its subject, to some extent confirms Bowen's suspicions, proceeding in linear fashion and glossing over much (especially about the author's sexuality), perhaps out of consideration for then-still-living contemporaries. Until now, Glendinning's was the only biography available. [End Page 126] Laurence, by contrast, follows Bowen's own lead to "present a life that spotlights scenes or offers glimpses," a "biography through a kaleidoscope of faces, places, feelings, countries, and loyalties." Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life opens with an imaginative walk down "two paths" that shaped the terrain of Bowen's life: one by Bowen's Court, which "imprinted the past and immersed her in Anglo-Irish traditions," and one by the seaside villas of Hythe, England, "a landscape that nurtured the farouche, her untamed qualities." This tension between tradition and self-invention sets up an illuminating framework for Bowen's many contradictions. Laurence regularly draws on Bowen's fiction to add depth and color to the events of her life, and on Bowen's life to unlock some of the fiction's puzzles. This technique makes excellent sense in light of the clear accounting, early on, of all the things about Bowen that we have no way of knowing, whether due to circumstance or Bowen's own careful control of her archive. Laurence's approach is broadly chronological, but individual chapters range widely through time by following threads plucked from particular events or works. Many landowning Anglo-Irish were peripatetic, moving regularly between the Irish countryside, Dublin, and England, and Bowen traveled more than most. Her father's nervous breakdown when she was a small child sent her and her mother to various family estates and to Kent in southern England, where much of her childhood and education took place, and her summers were spent at Bowen's Court. Early chapters vividly depict this agitated early-twentieth-century childhood and the unusual variety of houses and locales, friends and relatives that shaped it. An intriguing detail on which Laurence casts particular light is Bowen's "stammer," which appeared in her childhood and affected her throughout her life. Bowen herself said little about it, but it is a topic where the breadth of Laurence's research becomes clear: by attending to the commentary of Bowen's friends and literary connections, Laurence shows...