Elizabeth Bowen

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

'Real' characters in fiction are ghosts in the reader's real life?

Later in the same essay is this passage:

"These two heroines [Elizabeth Bennett and Emma] diffuse themselves through the pages with such extraordinary brilliance that it is difficult to believe they are not in the room."

[Nemonymous]

"The mood of the evening, with that faint taste of spring about it, and
the curious compulsive smoothness of the car - I felt as though someone else,
not me, were driving - all seemed to melt into what you were saying. And my love
for you reached a pitch of anguish, almost, out of our very nearness and sheer
happiness. Those particular miles of tree-road will always be yours. In a way I
don't want to drive them again till you come back, though I suppose I shall."
--from a letter by Elizabeth Bowen to Charles Ritchie (1957)

Perhaps ghosts are earthbound because of such yearnings (requited and
unrequited love)? Yearnings that turn them anguished? Finally mad? And if mad,
frightening to those of us who are not ghosts?
des

[Nemonymous]

I've just bought this new 2009 hot-off-the-press book shown below.

'ELIZABETH BOWEN: New Critical Perspectives'
Edited by Susan Osborn
Cork University Press



On back cover:
"...she is now considered among the most highly significant writers of the twentieth century."


I wonder if it mentions the published articles of DF Lewis:

2005 - Horror: Another 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf) , "The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen"

2008 - Wormwood #11, (Tartarus Press) "Towards The Drogulus: A Strange Implosion of Self After Reading Elizabeth Bowen"

And this MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/elizabeth_bowen

[Soukesian]

What a striking character portrait!

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Soukesian

What a striking character portrait!

Indeed. I've never seen that photograph before. She died in 1973.
Born in 1899 (the same year of birth as my Grandmother whom she resembles).

[Nemonymous]

I am very pleased to have bought and received yet another book about Elizabeth Bowen:
"Irish Writers in their Time"

Editor: Eibhear Walshe
Irish Academic Press 2009

Another new cover photograph of our heroine. Younger and fresher.

[Nemonymous]

An Elizabeth Bowen Cornucopia...that I have built up over the years for your delight:
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/...owen-quotes-1/

[Nemonymous]

AN ORGY OF GREAT QUOTES

“Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as that.”
- Elizabeth Bowen from ‘The Heat of the Day’ (1949)

“Meantime, another war had peopled the world with another generation of the not-dead, overlapping and crowding the living’s senses still more with the senses left by unlived lives.”
– Elizabeth Bowen from ‘A World of Love’ (1954)

He never knew what happened – a cold, black pit with no bottom opened inside himself; a red-hot bellwire jagged up though him from the pit of his frozen belly to the caves of his eyes. Then the hot, gummy rush of tears, the convulsion of his features, the terrible, square grin he felt his mouth take all made him his own shameful and squalid enemy.
Elizabeth Bowen – From ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ 1941

Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it: there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct.
Elizabeth Bowen – From ‘Mysterious Kôr’ 1944

It was a phenomenon of war-time city night that it brought out something provocative in the step of most modest women; Nature tapped out with the heels on the pavement an illicit semaphore. Alone was Louie in being almost never accosted; whatever it was was missing from her step; she walked, she strode, she bulked ahead through the dark with the sexless flat-footed nonchalance of a ten-year-old, only more heavily.
==============
The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. [...]
Elizabeth Bowen (Heat of the Day 1949)

MORE ELIZABETH BOWEN QUOTES (A LOT MORE!):
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/...owen-quotes-1/

[Nemonymous]

The whole of my lifetime work with Elizabeth Bowen Quotes is now in a book form. You will not be able to believe the power of these 250 pages of extracts!
Plus some of my Real-Time Reviews in the same book.
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/the-whole-of-my-lifetime-work-wit h-elizabeth-bowen-quotes-are-now-in-a-book/

[Nemonymous]

I've just set up my Elizabeth Bowen dedicated website:
http://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/