Suffering for her art

Tortured by love, longing for children, Elizabeth Bowen poured her pain into her exceptional novels, says her friend A N Wilson

The Heat of the Day, The Death of the Heart and the late masterpiece Eva Trout are among the finest English novels written in the mid-to-late-twentieth century.

In her brittle, mannered prose, Elizabeth Bowen caught the painfulness of love and its all-consuming pain. In Eva Trout (SPOILER ALERT!), there aches, throughout the comedy, the yearning for a child by a galumphing, tall, emotionally deprived woman.

It was no surprise to discover, when Elizabeth Bowen’s biography came to be written, how often she fell in love. Notably tall, and with a stammer, she communicated awkwardly with others.

She lived in the days of class distinction, and to be upper class – her manner was notably grande dame – cut her off from the many. She was the only child of the Irish country house – Bowen’s Court, County Cork, demolished by a property developer after she sold it in 1959. Her history of it is a grief-stricken threnody for the enlightened Ireland of Lady Gregory.

Julia Parry’s very moving new book talks about the love affair between her grandfather, Humphry House, and Elizabeth Bowen. This took place when House was a don at Oxford, in his early twenties, in the process both of getting married and of establishing himself as one of the foremost scholars of Victorian literature – editor of Hopkins, author of a superb study of Dickens.

The most chilling letter in the volume tries, falteringly, to explain why he had not told her that his wife was expecting a baby.