23 - Elizabeth Bowen

Summary

Elizabeth Bowen was born to Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin in 1899. She was the only child of a middle-class Protestant Unionist family, part of the Ascendancy class that monopolised political power in Ireland until the civil war resulted in partition and home rule (1920) and in the Irish settlement (1922). As a young child, Bowen experienced the privileged exclusivity of her class: her family spent winters in Dublin, where her father had a law practice, and summers at Bowen's Court, the 'Big House' on their land in County Cork. When Bowen was five, the protective intimacy of her family was disrupted by her father's mental breakdown; his subsequent illness was so severe that family separation was considered necessary, and his wife departed with their daughter to the south coast of England for a five-year period. In 1912, Bowen's father was sufficiently recovered to allow the family to reunite at Bowen's Court, but within the year Bowen's mother was to die from cancer. After her mother's death, Bowen's upbringing was organised by her aunts; she attended boarding schools in Hertfordshire and Kent and spent summers with her father at Bowen's Court. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who worked in education and later for the BBC; their marriage lasted until his death in 1952, and coexisted peacefully with her numerous love-affairs with men and women. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Bowen divided her life between countries, returning regularly from the literary circles of Oxford and London to Bowen's Court, which she inherited when she was thirty-one.