Noreen Colley, Elizabeth Bowen and Joan Reed.

It is not every day that you find a C.B.E. in your sock drawer, but that’s precisely what I came upon when I moved in to my late grandfather’s house in Co Kilkenny in 1999. ‘Commander, Order of the British Empire’, it announced.

I presented the medal to the tribal elder, with question marks, over breakfast. He wiped a few splashes of prune juice from his spectacles and studied it for a moment.

‘Oh yes, it’s Elizabeth’s’.

Elizabeth Bowen is a name I have known since earliest childhood. My grandfather, Gilbert Butler, was her second cousin. His wife Noreen (née Colley), my grandmother, was her first cousin and one of her best friends. Indeed, it was Elizabeth who introduced my grandparents to one another.

Both Elizabeth and Noreen descended from the Colley family of Corkagh, about whom I have written extensively here. Elizabeth, a decade older than Noreen, was an only child. Give that Noreen was the eldest of six siblings with whom Elizabeth lived as a teenager, the bond between the two is understandable.

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place, a fine Georgian house overlooking the Grand Canal in south Dublin, where she spent much of her first ‘seven winters.’ She was baptized in the nearby St Stephen’s Church on Upper Mount Street, aka the Pepper Canister Church. The family spent their summers at Bowen’s Court, near Kildorrery in north County Cork, where her Protestant forbears had lived since the 17th century, first in a traditional tower house and latterly in a tall, three-storey cube of a mansion which Elizabeth was later to inherit. Her mother was Florence Colley; her father, a barrister, Henry Bowen. Her parents had been married nine years when she was born and she was, as I say, their only child.

Bowen’s Court became so cold in winters that they relocated to their Dublin home on Herbert Place for the first seven years of Elizabeth’s life, from where her somewhat eccentric father went to practice at the King’s Inn on the River Liffey. And every summer, they returned once more to Bowen’s Court.

The Bowens of Bowen’s Court

Memorial to Henry Cole Bowen in The Cloisters at St Columba’s College.

The door to 15 Herbert Place, where Elizabeth was born and spent her first seven winters. (TB, 2025)

Her father Henry Cole Bowen (1862-1930) was the eldest son of Robert St. John Cole Bowen (1830-1888) of Bowen’s Court and his first wife, Elizabeth Jane Clarke the daughter of Charles Clarke of Graiguenoe Park, County Tipperary. (They were wed on 3 December 1860).  In 1882, a year after Elizabeth’s death from smallpox, Robert was married, secondly, to Georgiana Constance Antoinette Mansergh. He was widowed again by 1886 before his own death in 1888.

Educated at St Columba’s College and Trinity College, Dublin, Henry was then called to the bar. On 3 August 1884, his brother Captain Robert Cole Bowen, of Cork and Tipperary, died from a fall from his trap. On 29 April 1885, Henry – now based at 15 Herbert Place, Dublin – was granted probate of Robert’s will, in which he was left £600. His siblings  Sarah and Mervyn were also left  £1,000 between them. (here)

On 22 April 1887, Henry was among the new barristers called to the bar, at which time he was recorded as a Scholar and Senior Moderator, University of Dublin. Henry succeeded to Bowen’s Court the following year. He married twice, first to Florence Isabella Pomeroy Colley (Elizabeth’s mother) and later to Mary Katherine Gwynn.

In 1905, Henry developed a mental illness which was diagnosed as ‘anaemia of the brain’. He became prone to fits of rage, obliging his wife and daughter to flee to a rose-coloured seaside villa at Hythe in Kent. Elizabeth’s mother, to whom she was close, died of cancer in 1912, the same year her uncle Eddie Colley died in the Titanic tragedy and her aunt Constance succumbed to tuberculosis. Perhaps in consequence of all this trauma, the 13-year-old girl developed a stammer that she never shook off. She also became markedly aloof, a detachment that would ultimately make her such a sharp observer of life.

Elizabeth’s mother Florence (right) pictured with her grandmother Bena Colley, her uncle Eddie (who went down with Titanic) and her aunt Gertrude (great-grandmother to Ralph and Joseph Fiennes).

Elizabeth Bowen, aged 12.

The Teenage Years

Elizabeth was subsequently raised by a ‘committee of aunts’ in England and Ireland. She went to live with her aunt Laura Colley at Harpenden in Hertfordshire, where her Uncle Winkie was rector. She attended Harpenden Hall School before moving to Downe House School just as the war broke out in September 1914. Downe House was then located in Charles Darwin’s family home near Orpington in Kent. Elizabeth – known as Bitha by her school friends – learned science in Darwin’s old laboratory. She left at the end of the summer term in 1917 and later wrote about the school in a story called ‘The Mulberry Tree’. (The mulberry tree is the school logo.) She moved to London in 1918.

On 4 September 1918, her father was married, secondly, to Mary Katharine Gwynn (1879-1955), the youngest daughter of John Gwynn and his wife Lucy (née Smith O’Brien). Mary was a sister of Stephen Gwynn, MP, and the cricketer Lucius Gwynn, as well as a great-aunt of Fergus Kelly, father of my friend Martin Kelly. In later life she suffered from severe deafness and she was, I believe, a fan of ear trumpets. So too was her father, John. For more on the Gwynn family, see here.

Meanwhile, throughout those teenage years, she holidayed in Ireland with her mother’s brother, George Colley and his wife Edie (known to us as Baba), my great-grandparents. By 1916, the Colleys were living at Corkagh near Clondalkin, south Dublin, which Edie would ultimately inherit following the death of all three of her brothers in war. Elizabeth became intimate pals with George and Edie’s two sons and four daughters, known as the ‘Colley Girls’, my grandmother being the eldest of them all.

Edie was something of a mother figure to Elizabeth, who adored the ‘cheerful, astringent and ultra-Colley’ atmosphere at Corkagh. ‘The entire Corkagh garden shows endless loving care: it has not a weed in it.’

When she was 19 years old, Elizabeth stayed at Corkagh while serving as a volunteer nurse at Kilmainham Hospital. The opening scene of her short story ‘The Needlecase’ is set in Heuston Station, opposite Kilmainham. The story was published in 1941 as part of her collection titled ‘Look at All Those Roses.’

Bowen’s Court was constructed in the 1770s.

Her father recovered from his illness and married again. While Ireland tumbled towards into the War of Independence, Elizabeth again spent her summers at Bowen’s Court, playing tennis, strolling the garden and attending dances with the British officers garrisoned nearby. The number of soldiers had substantially increased since the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

Elizabeth’s short story “Charity” was first published in The Spectator on 5 July 1924. Keiko Tanaka, a visiting professor from Shizuoka Sangyo University in Japan (and an overseas member of the Elizabeth Bowen Society) believes Rachel, the subject of this story, is Elizabeth’s first cousin Noreen Colley, my grandmother. Keiko also thinks Noreen is central to Elizabeth’s story “The Jungle,” published in The Royal Magazine in November 1926. I think both stories can be found in ‘The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen.’

Keiko visited Oldfort with Maggie O’Malley Brown on 10 May 2025 and I obliged the two ladies to listen to Paul Robeson’s “St Louis Blues.” Just over a month later, she met my cousin Johnny Butler by front of the great Basho in Tokyp.

Love and Marriage

Elizabeth Bowen. Illustration: Derry Dillon

In 1921, Elizabeth fell head over heels in love with one such officer, John Anderson. When he proposed marriage, Edie Colley swiftly summoned Elizabeth to join her at Bordighera in north Italy. The Colley family had evacuated to Italy to escape the hostilities engulfing Ireland at that time. Elizabeth did not enjoy Bordighera; Hotel Angst, the balmy retreat where they stayed, would later provide the stage for her novel, The Hotel. More details of all this can be found in my account of the Colley family here. Anderson followed Elizabeth to Italy but was to return home unsuccessful, the engagement called off. Edie had refused Elizabeth permission to even meet the young man. To vent her anger, Elizabeth washed her young cousin Valerie’s hair in cloudy ammonia.

Elizabeth met her husband in 1923, the same year her first book of short stories, Encounters, was published. Thirty-year-old Alan Cameron was a large, dependable and hearty Englishman who had survived a bad gas attack at the Somme and won a Military Cross. They were married shortly afterwards.

In 1925, Alan was appointed Secretary for Education to the City of Oxford where he was to prove an administrator of considerable talent. The Camerons duly moved to Oxford where, inspired by her experiences of Ireland in 1919 – 1923, Elizabeth found the peace and time to start creating the books that would make her one of the most admired novelists of the early 20th century.

Ten years later, Alan was transferred to London to work with the BBC. By then, Elizabeth was an author of considerable renown, with such critically acclaimed novels as The House in Paris and The Last September upon the shelves. In London she became the central figure of a literary coterie and the Cameron’s home on Clarence Terrace was a well-known gathering place for intellectual luminaries.

Henry Cole Bowen died in 1930, at the age of 68. The late Martin Mansergh directed me to a newspaper cutting he found from 27 May 1930, with an account of Henry’s funeral. “Besides being a landowner,” wrote Martin, “he was a barrister, who had been an examiner of titles to the Land Commission, author of a standard work on statutory land purchase in Ireland, as well as legal adviser to the Church of Ireland Bishops of Cork and Limerick. He got on well with his Catholic neighbours, some of whom helped to carry his coffin to Farahy churchyard. His special pride was the rising fortunes of his daughter, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen.” The OPW opened a wonderful permanent exhibition on her at neighbouring Doneraile Court in the summer of 2020.’

Elizabeth in pearls by the Welsh photographer Angus McBean (1904-1990). I believe the original is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Its code may be H_0187_0006_0001

Left to right, Maurice Craig, Iris Murdoch, Eddy Sackville-West, Elizabeth Bowen, Hubert Butler.

The Move to Bowen’s Court

When Elizabeth’s father died in 1930, she inherited her childhood home at Bowen’s Court. She brilliantly described inheriting it as ‘something between a raison d’être and a predicament,’ a fabulously astute observation on bequests of many kinds. For the next three decades, she was constantly moving between England and Bowen’s Court, which was to be her home, her retreat, her court.

In the summer of 1937, Elizabeth went to the Salzburg Festival (24 July to 31 August), where she met Seán O’Faoláin. He was, like her, already married and an established writer. A brief but intense and intellectually charged affair followed. O’Faoláin later recalled her as “heart‑cloven and split‑minded,” seeing in her a divided Anglo‑Irish, European and Irish identity that fascinated him and shaped his reading of her work. He also wrote an admiring work “A Reading and Remembrance of Elizabeth Bowen” while his daughter Julia’s memoir hints at the impact of “other women” on the O’Faoláin household. For her part, Elizabeth seems to have drawn closer to Ireland after the affair, which sharpened her sense of Irish politics.

In 1942, she published Bowen’s Court, a thoughtful history of both house and family.

Gilbert and Noreen Butler, my grandparents, were frequent visitors to Bowen’s Court ,as were Gilbert’s brother Hubert Butler, and his wife Peggy. Indeed, being a cousin to both parties, Elizabeth was the Cupid who introduced Gilbert and Noreen in the first place. My grandfather popped the question while traveling down one weekend in 1938. When my mother was christened in 1940, Noreen invited Alan Cameron to stand as her godfather.

In 1945, Elizabeth wrote to Charles Ritchie from Bowen’s Court, while my grandparents were staying with her on a weekend that had ‘passed, I am bound to say, in a haze of drink, with a few tottering walks through the dripping woods’. She declared herself ‘devoted’ to my grandmother and describes her as ‘a beautiful, affectionate, malignant and funny creature’. Malignant? Does she mean, quite rightly, that my grandmother had a wicked sense of humour?

An intellectual gathering at Bowen’s Court with, left to right, Hubert Butler, Elizabeth Bowen and Iris Murdoch at the back, and Eddy Sackville West with Maurice Craig closest to camera.

Elizabeth had an almost sensual relationship with Bowen’s Court, where she hosted some of the most cerebral house parties in Ireland during the mid-20th century.

My grandmother owned a photograph album entitled ‘Bowen’s Court’, filled with black and white snaps of the house in those glory days. It’s an ever-revolving crew of high-brow genius. Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Maurice Craig, Isaiah Berlin, Rosamond Lehman, Eudora Welty, Nancy Spain, Lennox Robinson, Hubert Butler. “Noreen”, is a constant presence, peering from dining tables and hammocks, perched alongside other bright young things on the front steps of the house itself. My mother and uncle James make startling appearances from time to time while Elizabeth herself – “E’ – glides through the pages, proud and regal, the inevitable cigarette to hand.

Alan occasionally breaks into the foreground. He keenly understood Elizabeth’s passion for Bowen’s Court and threw his all into helping her run the place. There can be little doubt that he and his wife were extremely fond of one another. However, friendly as it was, the marriage was completely devoid of the pleasures of the bedroom, principally because Alan was impotent.  Alan is almost certainly the “Matthew” of her short story ‘The Disinheritance’ :

‘… in his friends here she stirred up a dusty sentiment. All this was dear to Matthew, who craved little more than refreshment: he was not a passionate man.’

Keiko Tanaka also reasons that the young wife’s cry, ‘Could a person go on loving and loving and never be wanted?’ in an early short story titled ‘The Shadowy Third’ was also Elizabeth’s cry.

As such, Alan seemingly tolerated his wife’s several lovers.

A night in for Alan Cameron and Elizabeth Bowen.

Elizabeth’s sparring intellect and curious beauty demanded a lover. In 1933, while attending an all-male luncheon at Wadham College in Oxford, she met Humphry House, a lecturer almost ten years her junior. Elizabeth, who already had three bestsellers under her belt, was seen as a doyenne of the avant garde. Their subsequent affair was the subject of the 2021 book, The Shadowy Third – Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen, collated by Humphry House’s granddaughter, Julia Parry, after she stumbled upon their love letters in a her uncle’s attic.

Elizabeth Bowen, Madeleine House, Humphry House and my grandmother, Noreen Colley, pictured at Bowen’s Court in 1938.

One of the reveals of this correspondence was that Elizabeth was still a virgin when they met and that, soon afterwards, she wasn’t. In time, Humphry married another woman, Madeleine House, but his roving eye had been problematic for Elizabeth from the outset and Madeleine’s arrival merely complicated matters further.

She also had a brief fling with Goronwy Rees, the Welsh journalist and Marxist intellectual who subsequently admitted to spying for the USSR during the Cold War.

In Ireland, there was a fleeting encounter with the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain, who shared Elizabeth’s growing despondency about the dreary countenance of de Valera’s Free State in the 1930s.

A more challenging visitor to Bowen’s Court was the popular American author Carson McCullers (1917-1967), who Elizabeth’s cousin Dudley Colley – brother of Noreen – kindly helped entertain in his sports car. She can be seen pretending to drive the car outside Bowen’s Court here.  Elizabeth offered these words to Spencer Carr, McCullers’ biographer (‘A Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers’):

Elizabeth Bowen and Alan Cameron by Sylvia Cooke-Collis

’Carson was a welcome visitor, but I must say a terrible handful. I always felt [she] was a destroyer; for which reason I chose never to be closely involved with her. Affection for her I did feel, and she also gave off an aura of genius  – unmistakable – which one had to respect …..  hers and mine could not be described as a ‘close friendship’  – in the sense that I rejoice in having a close friendship with that other great Deep-Southerner, Eudora Welty … Carson remains in my mind as a child genius, though her art, as we know, was great, somber, and above all, extremely mature.’

Elizabeth also befriended the young May Sarton, an American poet and novelist, but as both Keiko Tanaka and Victoria Glendinning observe, Elizabeth viewed her as an “adopted daughter” rather than a lover. Yes, they may have once slept together but that was simply because there was no extra bed for guests at the house in Rye when Elizabeth visited, so they had to share. There is no conclusive evidence of anything more to it, although May was famed for her explanations of the lesbian experience.

In any case, Elizabeth’s big love was Charles Ritchie.

Charles Ritchie

In one of the photographs in my grandmother’s album, there stands a tall, slightly crouching, gentleman dressed in suit, tie and shell-rimmed glasses. Elizabeth stands nearby holding a well-wrapped baby, the child of a neighbour. The tall man was Charles Ritchie, Elizabeth’s lover for 32 years.

Elizabeth Bowen, profile.

Elizabeth clearly liked younger men. Charles, seven years her junior, was a man of magnetic charm. Born into a wealthy family of British loyalists in Halifax, Nova Scotia, friends in high places had helped secure him a post in the Canadian Foreign Service. In 1939 he was dispatched to London to serve as Private Secretary to the Canadian High Commissioner. Prior to meeting Elizabeth, he was something of a professional ladykiller, an enormously charming bachelor attracted to ‘rococo Romanian princesses and baroque dilettantes.’

In 1941, the 35-year-old Canadian diplomat was attended a christening in Oxford where he was introduced to 41-year-old Elizabeth Bowen. He had already read at least one of her books and was immediately impressed by her worldly nature, ‘a narrow, intelligent face, watching eyes and a cruel, witty mouth’. It is not known exactly when the affair began but within two seasons, their relationship was certainly consummated. This lifelong affair was not a big secret, but the depth of their love was very much a private matter.

Shortly after Elizabeth’s death in the spring of 1973, Charles Ritchie was at dinner in London when he was informed that his love letters had been discovered by my grandmother while she was clearing out Bowen’s Court. He supposed my grandmother would burn the letters. ‘I hope so – and read them?’, he wrote mournfully in his diary. ‘What does it matter now?’ But the letters were not burned. My grandmother posted them back to Ritchie and, more’s the pity for literary historians, he appears to have destroyed them himself.

A supper party at Bowens Court with Ursula Vernon, James Egan, Mary Delamere, Elizabeth Bowen, Stephen Vernon and Iris Murdoch. Note the fireplace and see below.

Nonetheless, plenty of other letters survived and, in 2009, Simon & Schuster published a sizzling new book entitled ‘Love’s Civil War’, edited by Bowen’s biographer Victoria Glendinning, which had Elizabeth and Charles Ritchie’s love affair as its kernel. The book comprised the surviving letters and diaries of both Elizabeth and Ritchie, running from 1941 until shortly after her death.

There is an intense yet uncluttered rawness about the Bowen-Ritchie correspondence that makes it all eminently readable. A long-distance love affair explained in epic slow motion, combining the incisive and often witty analysis of hearts and minds, an extraordinary grace of language, and startling descriptions of the everyday world, or at least of Elizabeth and Ritchie’s everyday world.

Elizabeth particularly lets herself go, filling her letters with garrulous confessions, impulsive promises and droll observations. Charles Ritchie did not claim to be a writer; his contributions are downbeat, terse, hesitant, matter-of-fact.

That ‘Darling Elizabeth’ adored Ritchie from the outset, there can be no doubt. She yearned for him with a passion that would make most modern hearts wilt. He, on the other hand, approached her with a philanderer’s caution. Her mind impressed him, of course, but he was particularly astonished by her body which, 41 years on, reminded him of Donatello’s David, ‘pure in line and contour, lovely long legs and arms and small almost immature firm breasts. Naked she becomes poetic, ruthless and young…’

In Mark Bence Jones’s 1961 article on Bowen’s Court for the Irish Georgian Society quarterly bulletin, he wrote: ‘There is a hall, which has pedimented doorways and a pedimented chimney piece of grey marble.’  In 2019, that very same chimney piece, which warmed Elizabeth and my grandmother on many a cold evening, came up for sale in 2019 through a London firm called Jamb. It was bought by Beth Dater of New York who brilliantly donated it to the Irish Georgian Society. It is now installed in the IGS headquarters at the City Assembly House in Dublin. In October 2022, I delivered talks for the IGS galas in New York and Chicago, in which I told Elizabeth’s story (briefly, alongside other tales) and included this image. Photo: Donough Cahill.

London during the Blitz of the Second World War was undoubtedly a frightening place to live. But the possibility of impending death also lent a sense of urgency to everything, not least to romance.

Bowen’s Court,
Sunday, 2nd September 1945.
Beloved, your letter of August 22nd came on Friday… This summer has been too long. And except for the 3 weeks that I was in Ireland in June it is a summer that I shall always remember with repugnance. … To recollect London, as it has been for me since last January, is to recollect a nightmare…
The fact is, I’ve been living in the vague hope (I mean, a hope I never openly formulated, but clung to) that this autumn or early winter might, would, somehow bring you back to Europe even for a few weeks. I expect really I’d better be realistic, write that off, and pull strings to try and get in some capacity across the Atlantic? Hadn’t I? … I must not become inhuman. Perhaps I’m reverting to type—gaunt and solitary Protestant land-owner …
Oh Charles, I must stop. I cannot live through another autumn and winter without seeing you. Somehow I know I shall. Take care of yourself, dear dearest. To one person you are an entire world.
Love.
Your E.
[Underlinings – EB]

By the time Ritchie returned to Canada in 1945, he was four years into his lifelong affair with Elizabeth. However, the complications of Elizabeth having a husband spurred Ritchie himself to take a wife and, in January 1948, Ritchie married his second cousin, the memorably named Sylvia Smellie.

Ritchie’s marriage might have been the end of the affair, but it wasn’t. In 1949, Elizabeth published The Heat of the Day. This surprisingly objective study of espionage and betrayal was dedicated to Ritchie. He was also the role model for the lover in the book, the desperate and rather wretched Robert, who sells information to the ‘enemy’. Ritchie does not seem to have been offended by the comparison. He had long anticipated that their relationship would ‘develop into one of her long psychological novels in which I see myself being smothered in love and then dissected at leisure’.

There were often long periods, months and seasons, when they did not see one another, particularly after Ritchie’s marriage. He was a busy man, serving, for instance, as Canada’s Ambassador to the USA under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The letters and diaries reveal the excitement they felt as they prepared to meet again, followed by the blow-by-blow post-mortem of all they did and said. It is clear they felt each other’s presence despite the oceans and mountains between them. They maintained their passionate correspondence until her death in 1973. The following year, he published his diaries, ‘The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945,’ which won the 1974 Governor General’s Awards. He passed away in 1995.

There are so many aspects of Elizabeth’s life that catch the eye. During the Second World War, she became friendly with Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984), later the poet laureate, who was Press Attaché to the British Embassy in Dublin. At this time, she travelled a good deal between Britain and Ireland, reporting on Irish attitudes to neutrality and the British war effort to the Dominions Office and the Ministry of Information in London. [1a] In November 1940, for instance, she gave this prescient assessment of the Irish belief in neutrality:

‘It may be felt in England that Éire is making a fetish of her neutrality. But this assertion of her neutrality is Éire’s first free self-assertion: as such alone it would mean a great deal to her. Éire (and I think rightly) sees her neutrality as positive, not merely negative.’

Elizabeth Bowen in conversation with a gardener.

In 1951, Elizabeth also penned a history of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

Elizabeth’s legacy is infinitely greater than her private life. Publishing under her maiden name, she was destined to become one of Ireland’s most celebrated novelists. She wrote ten novels and over a hundred short stories, plus one children’s book and multiple essays and articles for magazines such as The Tatler. [1b]

Her ten books were:

1. The Hotel (1927)
2. The Last September (1929) [2] – her personal favourite, which was made into a movie with Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon.
3. Friends and Relations (1931)
4. The House in Paris (1935)  – about a dysfunctional love triangle that likely recalls her affair with Humphry House.
5. The Death of the Heart (1938)
6. Look at All Those Roses (1941), a collection of short stories, including The Needlecase.
7. Bowen’s Court (1942)
8. Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942)
9. The Heat of the Day (1949) – one of the finest wartime novels, dedicated to Charles Ritchie.
10. A Time in Rome(1960)
11. Eva Trout (1969), her enchanting final book, which was written in Hythe and shortlisted for the 1970 Booker Prize.

Fan Girls: Elizabeth Bowen with Sylvia Plath, photographed by James F Coyne. See here for a close up.

In 1948, Elizabeth was invested as a Commander, Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.), the medal that later turned up in my sock drawer. The medal was made by Garrard & Co., Goldsmiths, Jewellers &c to King George VI,

The following year she received the Freedom of Kent from the Maids of Kent and an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin.

Oxford University followed suit in 1956.

In 1951, Elizabeth penned a booklet entitled ‘The Shelbourne: A Centre in Dublin Life For More Than a Century’. The jacket, and the drawings in the book, were by Nora McGuinness. Published by George G. Harrap & Co., the booklet received renewed attention during the Black Lives Matter campaign of 2021 when the lamp-holding statues outside the hotel were temporarily taken down because Elizabeth incorrectly identified two of them as ‘slave-girls.’ They were in fact a pair of “Égyptienne” and “Négresse” (Nubian) women, sculpted by Mathurin Moreau (1822-1912) and cast in the Val d’Orsne foundry in Paris. The ‘shackles’ on their ankles are golden anklets that symbolise aristocratic rank.

Elizabeth was also was involved in editing the Michelin Green Guide to Ireland.

On 26 May 1953, Elizabeth was interviewed by a very smiley young Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Sylvia had been planning to interview Dylan Thomas, of whom she was a great fan. However, as a guest chief editor, she was “forced” to interview Elizabeth instead. The interview was set up by May Sarton, and took place at May’s home at 14 Wright Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two women were captured in a series of excellent photographs by James F Coyne but Sylvia Plath’s interview was somewhat shockingly cut to just a paragraph when it was finally published in Mademoiselle magazine.

Keiko Tanaka asks:

Elizabeth Bowen’s CBE

‘Was it because Bowen was angry about this experience that she stopped communicating with May Sarton afterward? Or was it because, as Sarton mentions in his reminiscences, on her last visit to Bowen’s Court, Sarton did not express her gratitude  when Bowen guided her on a tour of the ancient castles of Doneraile in the rain and cold? Probably, Bowen must have given up on Sarton, thinking that Bowen had nothing to give her anymore’.

In 1955, she wrote the short story “A Day in the Dark”, set in Cahir, County Tipperary. It was first published in the journal Botteghe Oscure that same year and later included as the title story in her 1965 collection of short stories.

Cecil Beaton, Jane Bown, Angus McBean and Gisèle Freund were among others to photograph Elizabeth. Her portrait was painted by Sylvia Cooke-Collis, Patrick Hennessy, and Mervyn Peake.

Elizabeth also popped into the BBC to be guest on Desert Island Discs on 11 March 1957 but, very sadly, the team at D.I.D. informed me in October 2022 that they no longer have the programme on tape. As one of the BBC team explained: ‘This is most likely because in those days not all programmes were kept for posterity and tapes were frequently reused as materials and storage were more expensive.’ However, there was a somewhat disjointed transcript of the interview, which I acquired from the BBC in November 2022.

Her eight chosen songs were:

Paul Robeson was Elizabeth’s first song choice when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1957.

1. Paul Robeson and his Orchestra, ‘St. Louis Blues’.
2. Andrei Kostelanetz, ‘Hallelujah‘ (from Hit the Desk).
3. Beethoven, Sonata in C. Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2, Opening, Arthur Schnabel.
4. Schubert, Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, unfinished, by the Boston Symphony, Orchestra, conducted by Charles Münch.
5. Mozart, Concerto in D. Minor, K.466, Beginning, Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
6. Richard Strauss, Ohne Mich from Der Rosenkavalier, Act 2, Richard Mayr, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Professor Robert Heger.
7. Bach; Walton, Sheep May Safely Graze (The Wise Virgins – Ballet Suite), Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, conducted by Sir William Walton).
8. Clarke, Trumpet Voluntary, with trumpet solo by George Eskdale, London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Mackerras.

My mum says Elizabeth was also a fan of The Platters. Here’s a Platters song to celebrate – Only You (And You Alone).

Elizabeth could not believe how little my parents listened to music and gifted them a record player to get them started.

Alan Cameron died in his sleep in the summer of 1952. His death was devastating to Elizabeth. Without his guiding voice, she was rudderless at Bowen’s Court and so the beloved house entered the final stages of its existence. As Hubert recalled:

‘She filled Bowen’s Court for many summers with English writers and the few Irish ones that sought her out. But then her husband died and The Bell died and finally she allowed Bowen’s Court itself to die.

In 1959, short of funds, she was compelled to put Bowen’s Court up for sale. She is said to have initially offered the property to her cousin Charles Cole Bowen, but he was too busy with his tobacco farm in Zimbabwe to take it on. Edmund Carroll of Fermoy, her solicitor, was then instructed to accept “the first firm offer” submitted. Patricia Laurence’s biography alleged that when Noreen and Gilbert Butler arrived to question the sale, Mr Carroll showed them the door but this is deemed untrue. In any event, the buyer was a local farmer by name of Cornelius O’Keefe who, I think, bought the house on the understanding that it would be preserved. She drove away from Bowen’s Court on 10 January 1960 and did not look back. Shortly afterwards, she crossed the Atlantic to New York State where she spent four months as an “Extra Professor” at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.

The approximate site of Bowen’s Court.

In 1961, Mark Bence Jones reported to the newly formed Irish Georgian Society that Bowen’s Court was ‘to be preserved in private occupation.’ An article published in the society bulletin included photographs that showed the exterior of the limestone mansion to be in good order. Shortly afterwards, the destruction began.  In 1962, the bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society lamented: ‘Bowen’s Court is in a pitiable state—most of it is pulled down … the roof has gone … the former home of our greatest living writer, Elizabeth Bowen, is being slowly murdered.’ Elizabeth was more stoic. When she learned that the demolition was complete, she remarked: ‘It was a clean end … Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin’.

Perhaps the same could be said of Corkagh, my grandmother’s house, which had been knocked down a year or so before. My cousin Finlay told me that when his mother Patricia (wife of Dudley Colley) met Elizabeth afterwards,  both women burst into tears.

Mr O’Keefe seems to have removed the roof, to avoid paying taxes, and felled all the mature woodland.

On her return from New York, Elizabeth lived for a time in a flat in Isaiah Berlin‘s home at Old Headington in Oxford, according to ‘ Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch,’ John Bayley’s memoirs of his wife. This may have been where Elizabeth wrote the script for a 60-minute programme called ‘Ireland –  The Tear and the Smile‘ for an American TV series, ‘The Twentieth Century”, produced by Isaac Kleinerman. Directed by Willard van Dyke, it aired on 5 February 1961.

After her return to Ireland, I think Elizabeth lived for a while at Doneraile, and then with the Blacks at Creagh Castle. In 1965, she purchased a modest house on Church Hill in the small coastal town of Hythe in Kent, where she had lived with her mother as a child. The area had been the site of the poorhouse of the church, so her house was not very expensive. She named it Carbery after the Colley’s ancestral home in Ireland. The building, which once had a civic plaque, has since been destroyed. In any case, Keiko Tanaka tells me Elizabeth did not live there long: ‘the sea breeze made her sick, so she went back to Oxford and stayed at the MacDonald Bear Hotel.’

Elizabeth was made a Companion of Literature on 6 July 1965.

She was living at Carbery when the President and Council of The Royal Society of Literature conferred the dignity of Companion of Literature on 6 July 1965 ‘in honour of her great gifts as a writer and in gratitude for her most excellent contribution to English Letters.’

After she underwent surgery for laryngeal cancer, she became well enough to attend university classes at Oxford with John Bayley, who served as the Warton Professor of English from 1974 until 1992. However, when her lung cancer worsened again, she entered London University Hospital.

In April 1972, she attended the wedding of my mother’s only brother James Butler and Gilly Becher in Bagenalstown, County Carlow. The wedding was the same day as the Aintree Grand National, which provided ample material for James’s best man to play with, given that his bride shared a surname with Becher’s Brook. My parents actually detoured to The Pike Inn, with Elizabeth, to watch the race.

She spent her last Christmas in Kinsale before returning to the London hospital. Hubert recalled meeting her during that last visit to Ireland.

‘When I last met her in County Kilkenny, just before her own death, she spoke of Ireland with such bitterness that I have tried to persuade myself that it was her last illness that was speaking and not her utter disillusionment.’

Edmund Carroll drew up her will shortly before she died in London at the age of 73 on 22 February 1973, a year and a day after my birth. I had wondered if I met her as a babe in my mother’s arms but my mother thinks it unlikely as Elizabeth was living in Hythe by then.

After her death, Charles Ritchie took care of her funeral, burial and all.

Her obituary in the New York Times remarked: “Miss Bowen’s writings possessed a delicacy and a sensitivity that placed her in the rank with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Henry James.” Someone else wrote: ‘Bowen’s novels are like Jane Austen on drugs.’ Either way, her works have an appeal that has flourished into this, the third decade of the 21st century, and it seems to me that her fame has mushroomed in the half century since she died.

In Hythe, she received the following obituary:

Hythe has lost one of its greatest adopted daughters in the death of Elizabeth Bowen, the novelist. The obituaries in the national papers paid rightful tribute to her many literary talents. But no mention was made of her deep Christian faith and it was as a Christian that Elizabeth Bowen took her part in the life of our community. To gain her friendship was a great privilege, for few possessed such generosity of spirit. I was always deeply impressed by her interest and encouragement in the affairs of our church. To take her Communion was an inspiration, for to Elizabeth it meant everything. To visit her in hospital in London not long before she died was a humbling experience. Her standards and her generosity and style were as strong and gracious as ever; her courage in the face of her advancing illness; her pithy and intelligent comments about life and people and her deep faith were a wonderful example as one prepared to go into hospital oneself. A great woman, a generous women and a fond woman – Hythe will be the poorer without her. May she rest in the love and peace of God.

After her death in a London hospital, her body was brought back to Ireland and buried in St Colman’s churchyard in Farahy, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court. My cousin Christoper Hone recalls driving down to the funeral with our late cousin Tony in his parents Mark 1 Ford Escort. My parents were also there.

A commemoration of her life is held annually in Farahy church, an event was started by Hubert Butler. I attended the service with my parents in September 2022 and enjoyed a beautiful choral evensong. (See Appendix 1 below).

Elizabeth Bowen at her typewriter.

Elizabeth Bowen’s travel typewriter.

Elizabeth’s Splendid Typewriter

Hunting through an outlying wardrobe at home some years ago, I unearthed a musty duck-egg blue travel typewriter, an Olympia Splendid 99. My mother inherited it from Elizabeth, along with her writing desk.

I like to think that this was the same typewriter upon which Elizabeth wrote the drafts of her novels such as ‘The Last September’ and ‘The Death of the Heart’.

The typewriter does not work anymore. Its cogs and wheels are choked with ash, presumably dropped as she tapped out her magical prose and puffed furiously upon the cigarettes that eventually killed her.

When I espied her Olympia Splendid 33 in the exhibition at Doneraile Court, I enquired and was told that it was likewise choc-o-bloc with fag ash!

*****

Appendix 1: A Visit to Bowen’s Court and Farahy, 2022

The grave of Elizabeth Bowen and Alan Cameron at Farahy in County Cork.

Farahy Church near Kildorrery, County Cork.

On 11 September 2022, I attended a Choral Evensong service at St Colman’s Church, Farahy, County Cork, with Commemoration and Thanksgiving for the life of Elizabeth Bowen. The service was sung by the Clerks Choral. The Rev Dr Robert McCarthy presided and the address was given by Dr Martin Mansergh (1946-2025), an Oxford history graduate who moved from the Department of Foreign Affairs to work as special adviser on Northern Ireland to three Fianna Fáil taoisigh.

We arrived rather too early, which allowed us time to drive through the recently harvested field in my father’s Renault, destined for Normandy a few days later, as we sought the site of BC. We found Dutch barns and crumbling walls and plenty enough rubble and derelict machinery knocking about but gained no real insight of where the house was.

Gilbert Butler, my grandfather, with my mother Jessica and uncle James, at Bowen’s Court, circa 1950.

By the time we arrived back at the plain church of Farahy, Mary Heffernan of the OPW and Chris Moore, the Doneraile Court guru, had also arrived. The choir were practising in the church and their voices echoed out through the graveyard as I climbed to the top in pursuit of Elizabeth and Alan. I find them, towards the top, alongside her parents.

My mother tells me the only presents she received from Alan was a corn in a matchbox and a copy of Stuart Little. He was dead by 1952 when she was twelve!

The last time Mum was here was when she was 17 on a bicycling holiday with her friend Rita Craigie (née Kinahan). It sounds like most of the bicycling involved putting a bike onto a bus but, at one point, they stopped to pick blackberries which they then brought, by bus, into Cork with a view to selling their goods. Such entrepreneurial flair was kiboshed because it was a half day in Cork and nobody was around. On their return, Rita had a puncture and the two of them had a terrible argument before returning to Bowen’s Court, on another bus, with their blackberries and bicycles in tow. Elizabeth gallantly bought all the blackberries.

In Farahy church, we kicked on with a liturgical service, using the 1926 prayer book, which cusses us all for our wickedness. A choir of fifteen random souls, gowned and no two the same, sounded like a thousand voices as they sang the Magnificat, and I mused upon how Elizabeth’s legacy still draws a crowd almost half a century on.

Appendix 2: The Elizabeth Bowen Exhibition at Doneraile Court, County Cork

One of the rooms at Doneraile where the Elizabeth Bowen Exhibition is in place.

In 2020, the Office of Public Works in Ireland opened a wonderful permanent exhibition on Elizabeth Bowen at Doneraile Court, County Cork. It comprises of three Bowen rooms, with photos, letters, books, another type-writer (a white Olympia Splendid 33, also full of ash!) and portraits, including my two old friends from Scatorish, now beautifully turned out. The exhibition details:

1. Elizabeth Bowen and her circle: photographs of Irish Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, Eddy Sackville West, Maurice Craig and her Colley/Butler relatives.
2. The Last Days of Bowen’s Court: a selection of letters to and from EB concerning her decision to sell and the process of selling, plus the OPW photographic survey of the house 1960 months ahead of the demolition.
3. Bowens Court Re-imagined: containing the portraits from the BC hall, her memorial photographic album of BC and a bookcase with 30 first editions of her works.

Also on show at Doneraile is a fine stone that came from the top right of the original doorcase. Chris Moore found it in 2021 in the field where Bowen’s Court once stood, not far from Doneraile. He got permission from the Howard family – who currently own the property – to remove it and show it in Doneraile.

Further Reading

• Victoria Glendenning, ‘Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer’ (1977)
• Victoria Glendinning, ed., with Judith Robertson, ‘Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941-1973’ (Simon & Schuster, 2009)
• Julia Parry, ‘The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen‘ (Duckworth, 2021).
• Hermione Lee, ‘Elizabeth Bowe’ (1981)
• Angus Wilson, ed., ‘Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen’ (1981).
• Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel’ (1995)
• Allan Hepburn, ‘The Bazaar and Other Stories’ (2008)
• Nicola Darwood, “Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973).” The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, no. 16, 2020, pp. 86–95.
• Keiko Tanaka, ‘The Companion to Elizabeth Bowen’ (Ronsosha Publisher: Japan, 2025)

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Laetitia Lefroy, Jessica Rathdonnell, Christopher Moore, Donough Cahill, Sasha Sykes, Gilly Fogg, Keiko Tanaka and others.

Footnotes

[1a] Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Complexity of era defined Irish neutrality in war,’ The Irish Times, 4 February 2012.

[1b] Elizabeth’s paperbacks were reissued by the University of Chicago Press circa 2019.

[2] BBC Sounds has a dramatised two-part version of ‘The Last September’ from 1996, written by Nigel Gearing and starring Anna Healy and Greg Wise, available here.

NB: Johnny Brosnan emailed me in May 2023 with a wiki tree that apparently connects Pope John Paul II to Colonel William Galwey of Mallow via Marie Curie and a Sarah Bowen of Bowenscourt. One of the Cootes married a Purdon to become Purdon Coote and they had a house in Bearforest Mallow.