The Mulberry Tree
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- $189.00
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- $189.00
Descripción editorial
This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant, and unpublished letters to close friends as Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, written with as much elegance and energy as her 'public' writing. In her introduction, Hermoine Lee shows how these writings display the same interests as Elizabeth Bowen's fiction - in Anglo-Irish dispossession and ambivalence, in the persistence of chilhood feelings, in treachery, ghosts, and the mysterious power of place, the lure of nostalgia , and the clash between individual and society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These essays, prefaces, reviews, letters and talks by Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Bowen (18991973) include reminiscences and autobiographical sketches of schoolgirl years, wartime London, breaking into print, as well as commentaries on Ivy Compton-Burnett, Cyril Connolly, Angus Wilson, Eudora Welty and other contemporaries. Among the letters are several to Virginia Woolf and William Plomer and part of a previously published correspondence with Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett on "Why Do I Write?'' Articles evaluate the work of Flaubert, Trollope and Katharine Mansfield. That Bowen's criticism and occasional writings are inextricably related to her fiction is well brought out by Lee (Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation in her preface and sectional introductions. Photos not seen by PW.
