Elizabeth Bowen in Context

This book provides innovative, up-to-date essays about Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. It integrates the latest thinking about her engagement, stances, and knowledge of twentieth-century literary movements. Elizabeth Bowen often remarked that she grew up with the twentieth century. Indeed, her writings are coterminous with the technological, social, and cultural developments of modernity.

Her novels and short stories, like her essays, register changes in architecture, visual art, soundscapes, the aesthetics and technique of fiction, attitudes towards sex and greater social freedom for women, and the long repercussions of warfare across the twentieth century. Bowen's writing reflects a deep engagement with other authors, whether they were her antecedents – Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, and D. H. Lawrence, among others – or her contemporaries, such as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Eudora Welty.

Her fiction and essays are a barometer of the literary, political, social, and cultural contexts in which she lived and wrote.