books in order

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen Books In Order

October 2019 : USA Hardback

October 2019 : UK Hardback

1996 : USA Hardback

February 1981 : USA Hardback

August 2006 : USA Paperback

September 1996 : USA Paperback

May 1999 : UK Paperback

May 1991 : UK Paperback

September 1989 : UK Paperback

June 1989 : USA Paperback

August 1985 : UK Paperback

October 1983 : UK Paperback

January 1982 : USA Paperback

1980 : UK Paperback

March 1996 : USA Audio Cassette

June 2019 : USA, Canada Kindle edition

Novels

  1. The Hotel (1927)
  2. The Last September (1929)
  3. Friends and Relations (1931)
  4. To the North (1932)
  5. The House in Paris (1935)
  6. The Death of the Heart (1938)
  7. The Heat of the Day (1948)
  8. The Shelbourne (1951)
  9. A World of Love (1955)
  10. The Little Girls (1964)
  11. The Good Tiger (1965)
  12. Eva Trout (1968)

Collections

  1. Encounters (1923)
  2. Ann Lee’s (1926)
  3. Joining Charles (1929)
  4. The Cat Jumps (1934)
  5. Look at All Those Roses (1941)
  6. The Demon Lover (1945)
  7. Selected Stories (1946)
  8. A Day in the Dark (1965)
  9. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1980)
  10. The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008)

Non fiction

  1. Bowen’s Court (1942)
  2. Seven Winters (1942)
  3. Anthony Trollope (1945)
  4. English Novelists (1946)
  5. Why Do I Write (1948)
  6. Collected Impressions (1950)
  7. A Time in Rome (1960)
  8. Pictures and Conversations (1974)
  9. The Heritage of British Literature (1983)
  10. The Mulberry Tree (1986)
  11. Notes on Eire, Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940-2 (1989)
  12. Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bowen (2003)

Book Covers

October 2019 : USA Hardback Book Covers

October 2019 : UK Hardback Book Covers

1996 : USA Hardback Book Covers

February 1981 : USA Hardback Book Covers

August 2006 : USA Paperback Book Covers

September 1996 : USA Paperback Book Covers

May 1999 : UK Paperback Book Covers

May 1991 : UK Paperback Book Covers

September 1989 : UK Paperback Book Covers

June 1989 : USA Paperback Book Covers

August 1985 : UK Paperback Book Covers

October 1983 : UK Paperback Book Covers

January 1982 : USA Paperback Book Covers

1980 : UK Paperback Book Covers

March 1996 : USA Audio Cassette Book Covers

June 2019 : USA, Canada Kindle edition Book Covers

Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen Books Overview

The Hotel

These were the balmy days of the 1920s. The English, liberated from one long war and not yet faced with the next had at least when well off a confident kind of vitality. The Hotel was a comfortable hotel on the Italian Riviera, run for prosperous English visitors. It was a closed world of wealth and a setting for the inexhaustible comedy of casual personal relationships among a variety of ‘nice’ people, all English, all wittily reflected with characteristic vivacity. Elizabeth Bowen’s wit, and her exact eye for social detail has often been compared to that of Jane Austen, and the similarity is perfectly captured in this, Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel.

The Last September

The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen’s portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history. In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.’Brilliant…
. A successful combination of social comedy and private tragedy.’ The Times Literary Supplement London

To the North

A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her late husband’s sister, Emmeline. Drawn to each other in the wake of their loss, the two set up house together and gradually become more entwined than they know. But the comfortable refuge they have made is ‘a house built on sand’; both realize it cannot last. While Cecilia, capricious and unsure if she can really love anyone, moves reluctantly toward a second marriage, Emmeline, a gentle and independent soul, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed for the first time by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Bowen s psychological acuity is on full display in a conclusion that plumbs the depths of this seemingly detached young woman in a single, life shattering moment.

The House in Paris

When eleven year old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers well appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother s. Henrietta longs to see a few sights in the foreign city; little does she know what fascinating secrets the Fisher house itself contains. For Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the relations between Leopold, Henrietta’s agitated hostess Naomi Fisher, Leopold s mysterious mother, his dead father, and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalizingly. And when Henrietta leaves the house that evening, it is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge usually reserved only for adults. One of Elizabeth Bowen s most artful and psychologically acute novels, The House in Paris is a timeless masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere, and represents the very best of Bowen s celebrated oeuvre.

The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen’s best known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations. In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half brother’s home in London. There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and her fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reaason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.

The Heat of the Day

In The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II. Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay. But for her, the sense of impending catastrophe becomes acutely personal when she discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling secrets to the enemy, and that the man who is following him wants Stella herself as the price of his silence. Caught between these two men, not sure whom to believe, Stella finds her world crumbling as she learns how little we can truly know of those around us.

A World of Love

In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth. In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty year old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.

The Little Girls

In 1914, three eleven year old girls buried a box in a thicket on the coast of England, shortly before World War I sent their lives on divergent paths. Nearly fifty years later, a series of mysteriously worded classified ads brings the women reluctantly together again. Dinah has grown from a chubby, bossy girl to a beautiful, eccentric widow. The clever, reticent Clare has blossomed into an imperious entrepreneur of independent means. And Sheila who was once the pretty princess of her small universe has weathered disappointed aspirations to become a chic and glossily correct housewife. As these radically different women confront one another and their shared secrets, the hard won complacencies of their present selves are irrevocably shattered. In a novel as subtle and compelling as a mystery, Elizabeth Bowen explores the buried revelations and the dangers that attend the summoning up of childhood and the long concealed scars of the past.

Eva Trout

Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel, epitomizes her bold exploration of the territory between the comedy of manners and cutting social commentary. Orphaned at a young age, Eva has found a home of sorts in Worcestershire with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles, and Iseult’s husband, Eric. From a safe distance in London, her legal guardian, Constantine, assumes that all’s well. But Eva’s flighty, romantic nature hasn’t entirely clicked with the Arbles household, and Eva is plotting to escape. When she sets out to hock her Jaguar and disappear without a trace, she unwittingly leaves a paper trail for her various custodians and all kinds of trouble to follow.

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Widely known for her much admired novels, including The Heat of the Day, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century’s writers equally through her short fiction. This collection brings together seventy nine magnificent stories written over the course of four decades. Vividly featuring scenes of bomb scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely obcerved children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen’s reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft transcend their time and place.

The Bazaar and Other Stories

Toward the end of her life, Elizabeth Bowen claimed that ‘a story deals in the not yet thought of but always possible.’ Playing with a range of circumstances broken engagements, encounters with ghosts, brushes with crime the stories in this collection demonstrate the virtuosity of technique that characterized all of Bowen’s writing. ‘The Lost Hope’ ranks with the best of her war stories, shattering the lives of soldiers and civilians alike and capturing the cancelled promise of a generation that came of age in the 1940s. The war can also clear a path to the future, as in ‘Comfort and Joy’ and ‘The Last Bus.’ Bowen’s characters are gripped by intense circumstances and respond either ardently or ironically or both, as in ‘Flowers Will Do.’ Sometimes the children in these stories are too wise for their age, such as the punctual protagonist of ‘The Unromantic Princess,’ and the adults occasionally behave with no insight at all. Bowen’s humor ranges from the sardonic to the light hearted. In the collection’s title story, ‘The Bazaar,’ Captain Winch begs for pins, ultimately stealing them, while Lady Hottenham gives an impromptu speech that drifts agonizingly into clich . The fairy tales, fables, and social dramas of this volume were never published together during Bowen’s lifetime, and a few exist only in unfinished draft. With this collection, Bowen’s gift with keen social observation is remarkably on display, echoing the keen eye of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Key Features: For the first time Bowen’s uncollected short stories are brought together in one volume Showcases the diversity of Bowen’s short fiction across her career Bowen’s familiar themes of marriage, travel, estrangement, disappointmen, and disinheritance Perfectly demonstrates Bowen’s mastery of the short story.

Bowen’s Court

‘Bowen’s Court‘ describes the history of the author’s Anglo Irish family in County Cork, from the Cromwellian sttlement until 1959. In ‘Seven Winters’, Elizabeth Bowen recalls, with endearing candour, her family and Dublin childhood.

Why Do I Write

Seven interesting letters which share interesting insights on how writers live and what does and does not affect them in the contemporary world as they go about arriving at their concerns.

Notes on Eire, Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940-2

This publication comprises some of the spy reports, which the author, Elizabeth Bowen, sent from Ireland during World War II, together with a historical review of Irish neutrality in that war. The story of this book starts in 1993, when extracts from Elizabeth Bowen’s works were included in ‘A North Cork Anthology’, with the qualification that, though her family had property connections in the area, she could not be regarded as a North Cork, or even an Irish, writer. This caused outrage in the Dublin media and some vicious attacks on Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford, the compilers of the Anthology. There was even doubt cast on the fact that Ms Bowen spied against Ireland in World War II. The upshot of that controversy was that the Aubane Historical Society traced several of Ms Bowen’s secret reports, which are published here in full. For those who would see Ms Bowen’s spying as needing no defence, on the supposition that the Allied war on Germany was absolutely justified, and that Neutrals had no case, this book provides an extensive survey of international affairs in the decades before the War, including De Valera’s role in the League of Nations. There are also sections on Irish and European Facism. The book is rounded out by reproducing the polemic about Bowen, which took place between the Aubane Historical Society and lumminaries of the ‘Irish Times’ and the ‘Sunday Business Post’.

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