Abstract
This chapter and the following, “Art and Intelligence” highlight Bowen’s wartime experiences. Being as old as the century, she lived through World War I and the Irish War of Independence as an adolescent and young woman, and World War II and the Cold War, when mature. During World War II, she emerged as a public intellectual and informer, and developed as documentary writer. In addition, she wrote a major novel about the war that was more an account of wartime climate and feeling than a page of history, The Heat of the Day, and also short stories about life between battles, Ivy Gripped the Steps. Her novel, The House in Paris reflects on the personal pain and impersonal history of England and Europe between the wars.
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Notes
- 1.
Twenty-six counties of Ireland became independent from Britain, Eire; six counties in the north remained loyal to Britain.
- 2.
BBC Interview, February 28, 1947, Rider Haggard’s She, BBC, NSA.
- 3.
Biggin Hill Aerodrome, opened by Royal Flying Corps, World War I to defend against German zeppelin attacks. http://rdcamsgatehistory.com/zoomify/zeppelins_1915_viewer.htm, Daily Mail, May 18, 1915.
- 4.
SW, 26.
- 5.
The Black and Tans, British forces recruited to fight in the Irish War of Independence.
- 6.
Bowen, “Frankly Speaking.”
- 7.
Noted by Fisk in “Turning One’s Back on the Fire of Life.”
- 8.
EB to VW, February 1941, SU.
- 9.
IGS, 182.
- 10.
PPT, 134.
- 11.
“Summer Night,” CS, 599.
- 12.
WL, 34, 43.
- 13.
Margaret Kennedy to EB, n.d. 1938, HRC 11.6.
- 14.
IGS, xii.
- 15.
HD, Knopf Records, NYPL, box 102, folder 18.
- 16.
EB to HH, July 9, 1939, HHC.
- 17.
BC, 455.
- 18.
IGS, 138, 182.
- 19.
HD, 40, 152–3, 50, 156.
- 20.
Ibid., 152–3.
- 21.
John Bayley to EB, n.d. (ca. 1965), HRC 10.6.
- 22.
Ritchie, Siren Years, 8, 66, 67, 74, 67, 100.
- 23.
HD, 100.
- 24.
EB to HH, June 29, 1936, HHC.
- 25.
Ibid., January 20, 1936.
- 26.
Elizabeth Taylor to EB, February 24 and March 14, 1949, HRC 12.1.
- 27.
Trilling, “Fiction in Review,” 254.
- 28.
Jameson, Novel in Contemporary Life, 2.
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Laurence, P. (2021). Snapshots of War (1939–1945). In: Elizabeth Bowen. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71360-7_6
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