On Elizabeth Bowen

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Trotter talks to Joanne O’Leary about the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen, from her weird families and idiosyncrasies of style, to her mastery of atmospherics and prescient use of technology to shape her characters. Find David's piece and more on Elizabeth Bowen in the LRB: https://lrb.me/bowenpod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.
0:06.1	You can subscribe to the LRB from just one pound per issue.
0:10.7	To find out more, go to LRB.me forward slash listen.
0:16.1	That's LRB.m.m.
0:18.8	Forward slash listen.
0:23.8	Or click on the link in the description below this episode.
0:29.5	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Joanna Leary, an editor at the paper,
0:33.7	and I am joined today by one of our longest standing contributors, David Trotter,
0:37.8	whose piece in the latest issue is about the writer Elizabeth Bowen. It's a review of a selection of Bowen's stories edited by Tessa Hadley and published by Vintage,
0:43.5	and of two of her novels, The Hotel from 1927 and Friends and Relations from 1931, both
0:49.2	recently reissued by Anchor. Hi David, thank you very much for joining me this morning.
0:55.7	Hello. The piece is really a consideration of Bowen's work as a whole. It teases out the various complexities and
1:01.0	contradictions that distinguished her life in fiction, her relationship with Ireland and its colonial
1:06.0	legacy, her fixation on dysfunctional family dynamics, and her very distinctive and at times obtuse style.
1:13.8	We'll go on to talk about these issues in detail, but let's begin by talking a little bit about
1:19.0	her background. So Bowen was born in 1890 into a wealthy and blue Irish family. Her ancestors had
1:26.5	come to Ireland with Cromwell in 1649 and in the 1770s
1:31.4	built Bowen Court, a large country house on a vast estate in North Cork, which Bowen then inherited
1:38.0	on her father's death in 1930. The Anglo-Irish big house, which in her own words was ignobly got, stands at the centre of her imagination, David.
1:48.4	Could you say a little bit more about her background and how her status within the Protestant ascendancy influenced her work?
1:56.4	Well, it's certainly a most unusual background because I think, I mean, not many modern writers can claim to have inherited a genuine stately pile as she did.
2:05.2	And of course it was, as you've been suggesting, a stately pile with freighted with political controversy.
	...

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