Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Ireland in 1899 but moved to England in 1907 and was educated in London. During the First and Second World Wars, she travelled frequently between Ireland and England. The wars made a huge impact on Bowen, which can be seen in her fiction. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Encounters, was published in 1923, and her best-known works include the novels The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). She inherited Bowen’s Court, an Irish country manor, in 1930. Though she continued to live primarily in England, many writers including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Iris Murdoch, visited her there. In the 1940s and 1950s, driven by the need to make money, she wrote extensively in the form of articles, reviews and travelogues. She died of lung cancer, in London, in February of 1973.