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“... behind. But the novels also belong to an important tradition of English writers, mostly women – Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor and Rumer Godden and Penelope Fitzgerald among them – whose subject is the old world of class and empire, and the systems of education and intricate cultural codes that supported ...”

“... entailed a continuous viewpoint, which happened to be that of a woman. Then there’s the case of Elizabeth Bowen, whose flair for social comedy and its concomitant, oblique social criticism, the author of The Female Form seems to disregard. Bowen, whose characteristic tone is amiably sardonic, is more or less lumped ...”

“... She understands remarkably well the ‘state of the nation’ idiom that came naturally to Elizabeth Gaskell, as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of ...”

“... though it is hard to imagine an occasion, but she would have let no one know, not even her sister. Elizabeth Bowen took a similarly tough view of friends as family, whereas the professional friend-seeker never tries to find one within the domestic circle. In The Death of the Heart the author muses that ‘we have no absent friends,’ and in The Little ...”

“... Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as ...”

“... and Cecilia have gone. (It is still there in the longer version but it is there only a beginning.) Elizabeth Bowen, it seems, read the novella with interest, but thought it cloying, except when it echoed Dusty Answer. The author is invited to drop by at the office for a glass of wine whenever she has the time. Had she, by the way, a sister at Girton six ...”

“... writers – the non-Li. It seems she is most drawn to Irish and Russian writers: William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern; Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gorky, though her pantheon is unpredictable and expands to take in Hardy and Mansfield, some oddly straightforward passages from the letters of Philip Larkin or the conundrum that is Marianne Moore ...”

“... from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often maudlin years, Betjeman’s openness is a great asset to his biographer just as it was a considerable source of material to the poet. The flyleaf of the Collected Poems ...”

“... storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break came when he was assigned to review a collection by Isaac Bashevis ...”

“... can further reflect that whereas in 1972 the three judges were Cyril Connolly, George Steiner and Elizabeth Bowen, in 1987 a television newscaster, by virtue of having written a biography of Viv Richards, was at least more ‘literary’ than one of the other judges. And then the novelists had better conclude that the only sensible attitude to the Booker ...”

“... the record, History seems to inspire good, gloomy aphorisms: ‘Makes of men date, like cars’ (Elizabeth Bowen); ‘Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else’ (Heywood Broun); ‘History books begin and end, but the events they describe do not’ (Collingwood); ‘When smashing monuments, save the pedestals – they always come in ...”

“... of Powell’s account, nor does he quote the memorably bitchy but somehow reassuring judgment of Elizabeth Bowen that Jean Connolly was really ‘a big soft crook’. Without extenuating her husband, it suggests that she was not really cast for the role of victim. He liked women who were good at looking after him, but also good at looking after ...”

“... which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his version of the ...”

“... Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brideshead Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American public-service television. Still, his former admirer Edmund Wilson was ...”

“... celebrated with a holiday in Ireland, the highlight of which was a happy fortnight as guests of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court. Returning to England in July, they briefly rented a house in Charleston, but soon moved to another rented house, Lovells Farm, in Marnhull, Dorset – Hardy’s Marlot – where ...”