Vissi d’Arte

If it is true that, autobiographies apart, most writers get the biographers they deserve, then having drawn Victoria Glendenning speaks awfully well for Elizabeth Bowen. In a strongly sympathetic, but in no sense indulgent, examination of Miss Bowen’s life and its antiphony with her work, Miss Glendenning has set a superlative standard.

To some, Elizabeth Bowen might seem one of the lesser luminaries among the many that blazed across literary England in the first half of the twentieth century, and a full-scale critical biography of her so shortly after her death (in 1973, at the age of 74), an exaggeration of her importance. Victoria Glendenning argues to the contrary—and almost persuades us— throughout this tactful, tasteful, discriminating, and witty book. Unequivocally she defends Elizabeth Bowen’s right to be regarded as a major writer: “She is to be spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf, on whom much more breath has been expended. She shares much of Virginia Woolf’s perception and sensibility: but Elizabeth Bowen’s perception and sensibility are more incisive, less confined, more at home in the world as well as in worlds elsewhere.”

RB

About the Author

Rene Kuhn Bryant

If it is true that, autobiographies apart, most writers get the biographers they deserve, then having drawn Victoria Glendenning speaks awfully well for Elizabeth Bowen. In a strongly sympathetic, but in no sense indulgent, examination of Miss Bowen’s life and its antiphony with her work, Miss Glendenning has set a superlative standard.

To some, Elizabeth Bowen might seem one of the lesser luminaries among the many that blazed across literary England in the first half of the twentieth century, and a full-scale critical biography of her so shortly after her death (in 1973, at the age of 74), an exaggeration of her importance. Victoria Glendenning argues to the contrary—and almost persuades us— throughout this tactful, tasteful, discriminating, and witty book. Unequivocally she defends Elizabeth Bowen’s right to be regarded as a major writer: “She is to be spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf, on whom much more breath has been expended. She shares much of Virginia Woolf’s perception and sensibility: but Elizabeth Bowen’s perception and sensibility are more incisive, less confined, more at home in the world as well as in worlds elsewhere.”