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 .
ISBN 978-185918-449-3, €39.00, £35, Hardback 234 x 156mm 272 pages
"... a welcome addittion to Bowen publications....it has a value in restoring a due emphasis to the novelist's birthplace [Cork] and to her sense of herself as an Irish, or Anglo-Irish woman. It contains, criticism, reviews, prefaces, social comment and reports for the Ministry of Information in London on the mood in Dublin vis-a-vis the war and controversial Irish neutrality........These essays remind us powerfully of how Ireland was in the past, and how it was viewed....[The editor]...provides a cogent and informative introduction.....the real virtue of the book...is to remind us how magnificently Elizabeth Bowen rose to every occasion....[and] ... through it all shines her distinctive critical manner, at once grand, colloquial and engagingly idiosyncratic."-The Irish Times
Elizabeth Bowen’s family had been settled in Farrahy in North Cork for nearly two hundred years by the time of her birth in 1899 and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history between landlord and landscape. As she wrote in her family history Bowen’s Court (1942) ‘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.
Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. He is the editor of Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press, 1993), Sex, Nation and Dissent, (Cork University Press, 1997)
More details http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/
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