Elizabeth Bowen (Lives of Modern Women)

(Elizabeth Bowen is undoubtedly one of the major writers of this century. Born in 1899 into an Anglo-Irish family of the old Protestant ascendancy, Elizabeth Bowen's heritage lent a special complexity to both her life and her work. Intelligent, vital, independent and generous, she could also be haughty, authoritative and caustic. She was immensely sociable and -her numerous friends included Virginia Woolf, Lord David Cecil, Isaiah Berlin, Rosamond Lehmann and Sean O'Faolain. Among her many novels the best-known and most widely-read are The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day and she also had a particular genius for short-story writing. A natural talent for social comedy combined with an electrifying evocation of atmosphere and an incisive insight into the wellsprings of human behaviour, give her work its imaginative originality. Elizabeth Bowen conducted her life with stylishness and integrity and, as Patricia Craig reveals in this perceptive study, she always displayed 'an artist's impulse and a wish for everyone to live at full height')