Elizabeth Bowen, CBE (1899–1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin and baptised in the nearby St Stephen’s Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents, Henry Charles Cole Bowen and Florence Bowen later brought her to Bowen’s Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery, County Cork, where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912 Bowen was brought up by her aunts. She was educated at Downe House School under the headship of Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay who helped her seek out a publisher for her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Encounters.
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Perspective
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Photography, Memory, Charm
If you look at your life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Attitude, Life, Perception
When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Experience, Genius
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Growth, Motivation
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