Fifteen Eighty Four

Thirty years ago, I planned to write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. With a monograph in mind, I assembled Bowen’s essays and reviews scattered across various magazines and newspapers. What started as a few items retrieved from obscurity quickly snowballed into hundreds. I began visiting archives and fitting together Bowen’s correspondence with a range of other writers: Graham Greene, William Plomer, May Sarton, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf. Whenever I travelled, I made a point of investigating repositories to locate Bowen’s letters and uncollected essays.

For my own sake and for the sake of other researchers, I began publishing books of these rediscovered materials, which I divided into short stories, essays, radio broadcasts, and book reviews. These were published as The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008), People, Places, Things (2008), Listening In (2010), and The Weight of a World of Feeling (2017). I thought that each of these volumes would help me to organize my monograph about Bowen at long last. But the more information I accumulated, the further away from the monograph I drifted. I began to think that knowing too much about a subject was a liability to writing a book. I also began to suspect that for every book that is written, several others orbit around it, like moons around a planet.

Elizabeth Bowen in Context came into being because of the diversity and range of scholarship on her fiction that has emerged in the past couple decades. Although there has been debate in Ireland about whether she is an Irish writer – she was born in Dublin and inherited a Georgian country house in County Cork – she does not easily qualify as a British writer either. She might best be described as an expatriate Irish writer, like Samuel Beckett or James Joyce. For her part, she often said that she felt most at home on the Irish Sea, midway between England and Ireland. Her sensibilities are as much European as they are either British or Irish, and in the postwar years she spent a considerable amount of time travelling across North America to give lectures and to teach writing classes. The contexts in which she wrote, therefore, were multiple, sometimes contradictory, but certainly stimulating for her creative life.

The contributors to this volume of essays shed new light on various aspects of Bowen’s career and publications: her engagement with technology, her sense of comedy, her representation of servants, her seemingly endless travels, her theatre-going, her relation with lovers, her feeling for architecture, her regrets about time past and missed opportunities. As a book reviewer, Bowen read voraciously in literature of her day, and she had strong opinions about some of her predecessors and contemporaries, such as Gustave Flaubert and D. H. Lawrence.

I still cherish ambitions to write a monograph about Bowen’s fiction. In the meanwhile, this volume, a planet unto itself, widens discussions about the contexts in which she lived and wrote.

Elizabeth Bowen in Context
Edited by Allan Hepburn