"All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.""Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.""Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.""Education is not so important as people think.""Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.""Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.""Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.""I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.""I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.""If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.""If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.""Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.""Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.""It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.""Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.""Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.""Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.""Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.""Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.""No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.""Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.""Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.""Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.""One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.""Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.""Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.""That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.""The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.""The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.""The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.""The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.""The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.""There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.""We are minor in everything but our passions.""When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.""Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't."
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Uppingham in Kildorrery County Cork where she spent her puberty. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts.
She was educated at Downe House School, under the headship of Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters (1923).
In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC. The marriage has been described as "a sexless but contented union" . She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin and at least one lesbian relationship, with the American poet, May Sarton .
In 1930, Bowen was the first woman to inherit Bowen's Court, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality. Bowen's political views tended towards Burkean conservatism.
Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, where Alan Cameron died a few months later. Many writers visited her at Bowen's Court, including Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1959 the house was sold and demolished.
After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of cancer in 1973, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy church yard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court. A commemoration of her life is held annually in Farahy church.
Elizabeth Bowen was greatly interested in ‘life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off,’ or in other words, in the innocence of orderly life, and in the eventual, irrepressible forces that transform experience. Bowen also examined the betrayal and secrets that lie beneath the veneer of respectability. The style of her works is highly wrought and owes much to literary modernism. She was an admirer of film and influenced by the filmmaking techniques of her day. The locations in which Bowen's works are set often bear heavily on the psychology of the characters and, thus, also on the plots.
Bowen's war novel The Heat of the Day is considered one of the quintessential depictions of London atmosphere during the bombing raids of World War II.
