One of her closest relatives was Audrey Fiennes, a cousin about her age. While this could have been a lonely existence, both her parents came from large extended families, and an Anglo-Irish network of adults and children surrounded Bowen during this period in her life. She and her mother moved to England and spent the next five years moving from villa to villa on the Kent coast.
When Bowen was seven, her father was hospitalized for a mental condition. On occasion, Bowen moved from house to house, similar to the treks from hotel to hotel that Portia and her parents make across France and Switzerland.īowen was born June 7, 1899, in Dublin, Ireland, into a wealthy and socially prominent family with ties to England. She found herself at various times being raised by a group of aunts. Author BiographyĮlizabeth Bowen's early years-while not quite as grim as those of Portia, the main character in her most well-regarded novel, The Death of the Heart-were unstable. Her formative experiences as an outsider gave her a platform from which she could tell, with particularly keen perception, the story of a girl who is never quite at home. She was born in Ireland but to landed gentry with strong ties to Protestant England and spent much of her childhood moving from place to place and living with a variety of relatives. Her innocence and naiveté are a challenge to the Quaynes and their friends, who find her eagerness to fit in and her keen observations unsettling.Ĭritics note that Bowen's background is reflected in many of her books, including The Death of the Heart. Portia is lost in Thomas and Anna Quayne's world so she seeks solace and love in Eddie, Anna's ne'er-do-well friend and protégé. Bowen exposes a segment of English society between World War I and World War II that is stifling and almost completely lacking in compassion. The Death of the Heart is the story of an orphaned sixteen-year-old girl, Portia, whose half-brother and his wife reluctantly take her into their luxurious but emotionally sterile London home after the deaths of her parents. By this time, Bowen had nine other published books, the Irish Academy of Letters had elected her a member, and critics were comparing her to such celebrated writers as Virginia Woolf, E. She was a prolific writer, and by the time she had published this, her sixth novel, her writing career had been fifteen years in the making.
Published in 1938, The Death of the Heart is Elizabeth Bowen's most well-known and popular novel.
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