Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish Writings

Acknowledgements

In putting this collection together I was given great assistance by the direct help and by the writings of many Bowen scholars and I want to thank Pat Coughlan, Vera Kreilkamp, Neil Corcoran, Clair Wills, Anne Fogarty, Roy Foster, Victoria Glendinning, Heather Bryant Jordan, Hermione Lee, Bill McCormack, Declan Kiberd, Margot Backus, Heather Laird, Mary Breen, Tina O’Toole, Julie Anne Stevens, Noreen Doody, Derek Hand, Sinéad Mooney, Nicholas Royle, Andrew Bennett, Maud Ellmann and others for feedback and inspiration. I owe Phyllis Lassner a great debt for her kindness in reading the introduction and her generosity in providing me with a great deal of feedback and the benefit of her ground-breaking Bowen scholarship. Donald O’Driscoll’s valuable suggestions on this essay and his support throughout this project is much appreciated. Allan Hepburn was most generous in sharing his extensive research on Bowen’s essays and also in answering my questions and queries and I relied on his scholarship in his two collections of Bowen essays for a definite text here, particularly People, Places, Things (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). I would like to mention my doctoral student Mike Waldron for his innovative thinking on Bowen. My UCC friends, in particular Anne Fitzgerald, Hilary Lennon, Eamonn O’Carragain, Graham Allen, Elaine Hurley and Carol Quinn gave great help and assistance. Camilla Hornby and Sarah Lewis of Curtis Brown were very co-operative in terms of permissions. I would like to acknowledge the help of the National Archives in London in tracing Bowen’s wartime reports. The Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, in particular , Peter Murray and Anne Boddaert, gave me permission to use the Bowen Hennessy portrait on the cover and the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Science UCC Publication Fund and the National University of Ireland Publication Fund gave me much appreciated grants towards the cost of the volume. Ciaran Wallace and Sebastian Acknowledgements xi Enke helped me trace some of these writings and I thank them both very much for this. My research happened thanks to grants from The UCC Arts Faculty Research Fund to visit London and from the Royal Irish Academy Mobility Grant to work on the Bowen archives in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In Texas, Elizabeth Cullingford, Margot Backus and Molly Schwartzenburg were very hospitable and of great assistance. I would also like to thank Brendan Barrington and the Dublin Review for publishing my essay on Bowen and Rome; Caroline Walsh for asking me to review and write on Bowen for The Irish Times; the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Dr Robert McCarthy, for invitations to speak at the Bowen commemorations in Farahy; Dr Marie Bourke for an invitation to talk about Bowen at the National Gallery of Ireland, and Liam Cusack for invitations to talk at the Bowen/Trevor school in Mitchelstown. Dr Eve Patten in School of English, Trinity College, and Dr Poul Holm, Dr Jason McElligott, Dr Jennifer Edmond and Eva Mulhause at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College, were most helpful and Mike Collins, Sophie Watson and Maria O’Donovan of Cork University Press were invaluable in guiding this manuscript through each stage and I would like to thank them for their patience, professionalism and support. I have dedicated this study to Dermot Keogh in gratitude and recognition of his support, outstanding scholarship, encouragement and invaluable friendship. xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...