A Bequest of Her Own: The Reinvention of Elizabeth Bowen

In her early seventies, when Elizabeth Bowen lost her voice to cancer, she began writing some autobiographical pieces that were eventually collected in the 1975 volume called Pictures and Conversations.Unsure whether she would be able to complete the work before her death, she asked her agent and executor Spencer Curtis Brown to see that the book got published. On his visit to her in the hospital, just before her death in February, 1973, she repeated her instructions.¹ In these essays, Bowen attempts both to come to terms with her personal inheritance, and to keep her literary reputation intact. It is here that she offered her comments on the critical studies emerging on her work: "While appreciative of the honour done me and of the hard work involved, I have found some of them wildly off the mark. "As if to complete the thought, she threw out a challenge that laid claim to anything anyone else might have to say about her or her writing: "If anyone must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen?" (PC 62).

That claim is by now substantial: in the more than three decades since her death, her writing has spawned a remarkably wide range of reactions, both academic and popular. These responses—and Bowen's anticipation of them—touch on a central conundrum of literary criticism: how does the writer influence what is said or not said about her? In posterity, Bowen's reputation has battled with the lingering perception of her as a "'minor' figure whose work is most often read as a charming but dated embodiment of traditional literary and social values."² Her work has lingered in a state of critical ambivalence, not unlike the one she herself inhabited. Writing of what happens to a book after it has been published, she describes the "cable" between the author and her words being "cut"; thereafter, the work embarks "upon an unforeseeable life of its own" (PC 63). The analogy to childbirth is clear; she indicates that fiction embodies what she will leave behind. In imagining her own autobiography, she explains that "I shall know more about this book when I am underway with it. A considerable—in fact, probably the greater—part of what it is to be about is still fairly deep down in my consciousness, waiting to be brought to the surface" (PC 63). The state of Bowen studies continues to mirror and to absorb this exploration of what lies just beneath what is apparent to us.

Anglo-Irish, Bowen professed to feel at home in neither country, but most enduringly in the middle of the Irish Sea. She blamed her race for her "belligerence" (PC 19).Her ancestors traced their land grant back to Cromwell, and she struggled to keep Bowen's Court, the familial estate in Country Cork, going after her father's death in 1930; she was the first woman to inherit the house since 1775, the year its cornerstone was set. Generations of Bowens had resorted to selling off portions of the establishment whenever they needed money. By the time she received the deed, little acreage was left to keep the place in good repair. Most of the money she earned from her writing went to pay for the house. The proceeds from her most commercially successful novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), went to install indoor plumbing and electricity. House guests, including her editor, Blanche Knopf, greatly appreciated these renovations; May Sarton had noted that, when she stayed at the place in the 1930s, it was cold, full of moths, and the food was dreadful.³

When Bowen's husband died in 1952, shortly after they had moved to Ireland, she had to rely completely on her own earnings to keep the house in good repair. This financial pressure led her to write articles for such well-paying American magazines as Good Housekeeping, House and Garden, and Woman's Day. Academics often raise their eyebrows at the titles of some of these pieces, among them"How to Be Yourself But Not Eccentric" and...