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“... of genius, or neargenius – time will decide – who was heart-cloven and split-minded it is Elizabeth Bowen. Romantic-realist, yearning-sceptic, emotional-intellectual, poetic-pragmatist, objective-subjective, gregarious-detached (though everybody who resides in a typewriter has to be a bit of that), tragi-humorous, consistently declaring herself ...”

“... later work, to the older authorial convention of a time-free consciousness. As a pre-war writer Elizabeth Bowen made gestures towards the Modern but preferred her own pattern of individualities. She was not much of a theorist, though she liked to advance her ideas on fiction boldly and with a certain panache, in what she would have described as a ...”

“... There are​ more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life ...”

“... Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death ...”

“... yet it must be obtained without any suggestion of the poetic, which is what Pritchett contrived. Elizabeth Bowen sometimes obtained the same sort of effect by different means. In one of her stories a married woman and a younger man, who know in their heart of hearts that their affair will soon break up, have spent Sunday afternoon on a common in ...”

“... and Yeats (he is writing the authorised biography). Other figures to appear are Trollope and Elizabeth Bowen and Maud Gonne. It is clear that Foster is more interested in posh Protestants than in the members of the Short Strand Martyrs Memorial Flute Band or their like. It is also clear that he does not favour Irish commemorations, even ones which ...”

“... Not since Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen and Vicki Baum can a novelist have looked so readily for resonance in the name and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting ...”

“... up three wide steps covered in yellow linoleum. There, not knowing how to choose, I gravitated to Elizabeth Bowen – along with others, including Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole, of whose writing I can’t now recall even the faintest flavour. I’d never heard of any of them – I’d not heard of anybody much – but I was reassured by bound sets ...”

“... by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three subsequent novels and ...”

“... unveiled in the posthumous edition of Vive Moi! – long-running affairs with the writers Elizabeth Bowen and Honor Tracy and the American socialite Alene Erlanger – add to the dishonesty of his public image. Yet O’Faolain’s claim to heroism lies not in any righteous constancy but precisely in his inconsistency. Faced with the insistence of ...”

“... has insider status. The cover of the American paperback of The Chateau reproduces the praise of Elizabeth Bowen; the novel’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bowen; it is dedicated to an ‘E.B.’ This new edition of All the Days and Nights quotes the praise of Eudora Welty, to whom one of the stories is ...”

“... that seems at first surprising for she was not, in any usual sense, a good letter writer. Unlike Elizabeth Bowen or Penelope Fitzgerald, with both of whom she might be compared as a novelist, there is no sense of her trying out obviously literary ideas. There is scant detail in description, little incident and the few character sketches are ...”

“... of the fashion feature which, in the Forties and Fifties, brought to mind a scene from a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, or a short story by Somerset Maugham, expanded to include Genet, The Story of O and comic books. Evans and Thornton spend some time analysing the feminist position on femininity, and here the disapproving tones of 15th-century Venetian ...”

“... takes the reader Right Off the Map, Eliot invites him to join the ‘Journey of the Magi’, and Elizabeth Bowen allows him to live in The Hotel.’ It is significant that, in what is still the age of the great Cunarders, somebody calls a popular play Outward Bound, and that Yeats, having to find a title for a poem, decides not on ‘Going’ or ...”