Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was one of the finest short story writers and novelists of the twentieth century in English. Her writing, ironic, subtle, often conveying in a single line enough for a whole chapter about the characters she describes, shifts between the landscape of her native Ireland, and the London and suburbia of the Britain she was to spend much of her life in. The very brief `Demon Lover’ is representative of her skill – the story of the single episode of a Mrs Drover whose fiancé after them promising to wait for each other, then goes of to the First World War, and disappears, presumed dead. A quarter of a century later, married and with children, she returns to her house in London to collect some things, troubled by occasional letters sent anonymously to her threatening of someone’s return. For some reason, she feels that she needs to get away from the house as soon as she can, and flees down the street to get a taxi. `The driver braked almost to a stop,’ the story ends, once she is inside,
`turned around and slid the glass panel down; the jolt of this flung Mrs Drover forward till her face was almost into the glass. Through the aperture drive and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye. Mrs Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that, she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.’ (Elizabeth Bowen, `Collected Stories’, Everyman, London, 2019, 738)
The quirkiness of her style is reflected in her life, and the neat symmetry with which the seaside town in Kent of Hythe figures at its start and end. While born in Dublin, she moved to Britain after the nervous breakdown of her lawyer father. Her mother and she lived along the Kent coast, settling in Folkestone to stay with a her widowed aunt Isabel Chenevix-Trench, and eventually Hythe, where her mother died of cancer in 1912. After a brief period staying with a relative in Hertfordshire, she attended Downe House boarding school in Orpington, then in Kent. From 1920 she was based in London, marrying Alan Cameron, an educational administrator in 1923. Their marriage was apparently an unorthodox one, going unconsummated but working well because of their shared interests and platonic affection for each other. She was to have numerous affairs over the years, perhaps most importantly with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat. This latter, which started in 1941, was to last even through his own marriage in 1948 to Bowen’s death over two decades later.
Despite inheriting the large mansion of Bowen’s Court in County Cork (which was to burn down in 1961), Elizabeth rarely stayed there, spending most of her time travelling or based in Britain. Hythe was to make its re-appearance in 1966, when she moved to a house she was to name Carbery, Church Hill, a small detached building close to St Leonard’s, which she had attended with her mother as a young girl, overlooking the rest of the town down to the sea front. This remained her base till she died of lung cancer in 1973.
In a biography of her, Patricia Laurence refers to the role that this area played throughout her life, from the time of her mother’s death there. `When living with her Irish cousins in Folkestone, Bowen uncomfortably observed that “nationality showed itself” as they went about the town in “Celtic robes of scarlet or green, with Tara brooches clamped to their shoulders.”’ (Patricia Laurence, `Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life’, Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, 73) Bowen, according to Laurence, `divided her visual past: Dublin and Hythe were opposed places in her mind. She often remarked that she saw England more than the English did because of her fresh impressions when she arrived as a child: she had the migrant’s sense of unfamiliarity’ (75). This place on the coast of Kent looking across to France was one of the open English landscapes where `she first tried to find words to match her impressions that, she later said, made her a novelist.’ Encountering the `contrasting landscapes in Folkestone and Hythe, so different from Kildorrery, stimulated, Bowen said, her visual imagination.’ The contrast between the white cliffs around her adopted home and the green fields around Bowen’s court entered what Laurence calls a `visual reservoir’ which she then drew on in her writing (75). Perhaps the most explicit of these is in `Ivy Gripped the Steps’, in which Southstone bears resemblances to Folkestone:
`This was, or had been, one of the best residential avenues in Southstone, into which private hotels intruded only with the most breathless, costly discretion: if it was not that now it was nothing else, for there was nothing else for it to be. Lines of chestnut trees had been planted along the pavements, along the railed strop of lawn that divided the avenue down the middle.’ (Bowen, 751).
Attention to Bowen’s work illuminates this key issue of how landscape and the history that can be read and felt from it, do impact on some writer’s work in decisive ways.