Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish Writings

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Elizabeth Bowen’s SelectedIrish Writings Elizabeth Bowen’s SelectedIrish Writings Edited by Eibhear Walshe Edited by Eibhear Walshe 9 781859 184493 ISBN 978-1-85918-449-3 www.corkuniversitypress.com Cover image: Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen by Patrick Hennessy, courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Cover: Burns Design Author photograph: courtesy Tomas Irish Dr Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. His biography Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006 and he edited Elizabeth Bowen: Visions and Revisions for Irish Academic Press in 2008. His other publications include the edited collections, Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press: 1993), Sex, Nation and Dissent, (Cork University Press: 1997) Elizabeth Bowen Remembered (Four Courts Press: 1999) and The Plays of Teresa Deevy (Mellen Press: 2003). He co-edited, with Brian Cliff, Representing the Troubles (Four Courts: 2004) and Molly Keane: Centenary Essays, (Four Courts: 2006) with Gwenda Young. He has completed a study of Wilde and Modern Ireland. His memoir, Cissie’s Abattoir, was published by The Collins Press in 2009. This anthology of the Irish writings of the Anglo-Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973 gathers together, for the first time, her Irish writings including her lectures, essays, reviews and reports, and includes an extensive introductory essay by the editor as well as annotations and a critical bibliography. Her family had been settled in Farrahy in North Cork for nearly 200 years by the time of her birth in 1899 and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history betweenlandlordand landscape.As shewrote inher family history Bowen’s Court ‘The land outside Bowen’s Court’s windows left prints on my ancestors eyes that looked out: Perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me‘. In all of these Irish writings, Bowen looked homewards to north Cork as a place of stability and loyalty in an endangered world and her vision of Anglo-Ireland becomes her talisman, her source for imaginative power and stability in war-disordered London. This edited collection charts her illuminating relationship with the new Irish state from her perspective as an Anglo-Irish novelist and provides an account of her life-long engagement with her own country from 1929 until the late 1960s. ...