WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIA GLENDINNING
The Irish troubles rage, but up at the 'Big House', tennis parties, dances and flirtations with the English officers continue, undisturbed by the ambushes, arrests and burning country beyond the gates. Faint vibrations of discord reach the young girl Lois, who is straining for her own freedom, and she will witness the troubles surge closer and reach their irrevocable, inevitable climax.
About the Author
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited.
Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends And Relations (1931), To The North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House In Paris (1935), The Death Of The Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat Of The Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelborne (1951), A World Of Love (1955), A Time In Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book Eva Trout (1969).
She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.
Industry Reviews
A republication, with a new preface, of Elizabeth Bowen's second novel which appeared originally in 1929. This, more than any of her works, has a "deep, clouded spontaneous source" in her own youth in Ireland during the "troubled times" when guerilla guns reverberated against a formal tradition which has its direct reflection here. For it is the succession of tennis parties and dances, teas and visits which frames and stirs the life within Danielstown, the home of the Naylors, imperiously and at times imperviously Anglo-Irish aristocrats whose social snobberies extend as well to the British officers garrisoned there. Among them is Gerald, who falls in love with their niece Lois, Lois who is impressionably and wishfully romantic, anxious to match the absolutism of Gerald's love. And that "lovely, too mortal month" comes to its close with Gerald's death, and the burning of the house which is to free Lois for the future of which she is still so unsure, while for the Naylore there is only the desolate destruction of a world which is both substance and symbol... The narrative here is fragmentary- to a point of fraility: but there is once again the matchless pervasiveness of place and time as it touches off a private world of expectant emotion and intimation. (Kirkus Reviews)
