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  • Published: 1 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473588844
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Selected and Introduced by Tessa Hadley




A beautiful paperback edition of Elizabeth Bowen's short stories, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley.

'Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them' Vogue

SELECTED AND WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY

A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil.

Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen's finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen's ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen's native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz.

Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body.

  • Published: 1 April 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473588844
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited.

Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelborne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book Eva Trout (1969).

She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

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Praise for The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul

Anne Tyler

Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them

V .S. Pritchett, Vogue

Like Woolf, like Spark, her language is clear but her effects complex, creating shimmering reflections of reality, her world recognisable but just out of reach

Guardian

[Bowen's] fiction's uniqueness lies in its versatile, modern understanding of place as 'inner landscape'... [an] astute selection of the short stories... [Brown] write[s] fiction with the texture of history

London Review of Books

A judiciously chosen selection of stories that showcases the brilliance of Elizabeth Bowen throughout her career. Tessa Hadley's illuminating and affectionate introduction positions Bowen firmly where she belongs - as one of the most remarkable writers of short stories in any era.

Julia Parry, author of The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen