Abstract
Late in her life, Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) wondered why critics did not focus more on place in her writing: “Am I not manifestly a writer for whom places loom large?” (Pictures and Conversations 34). Bowen’s powerful concern with location was animated by the instability of her personal life and the life of her century. She felt dislocated by her father’s mental illness and his voluntary incarceration; by her flight to England with her mother at the age of seven; by their peripatetic life in multiple houses and towns; and most of all, by her mother’s death when Bowen was thirteen years old (Glendinning 25-32). Acutely aware of her Anglo-Irish heritage, she also felt alienated from nationality. Sean O’Faolain described her as “heart-cloven and split-minded” (15), divided between her Irish and English identities. She felt “most at home in mid-Irish sea. The transit from Ireland to England and back again dominates her work as it did her life” (Foster 107). And, as her fiction makes clear, Bowen responded intensely to the two world wars that shattered normalcy and continuity during her youth and adulthood.
Date of this Version
2013
Recommended Citation
Linett, Maren, "Modes of Dislocation: Jewishness and Deafness in Elizabeth Bowen" (2013). Department of English Faculty Publications. Paper 9.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/englpubs/9
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (2013). Modes of Dislocation: Jewishness and Deafness in Elizabeth Bowen. Studies in the Novel 45(2), 259-278. Copyright University of North Texas, it is shared here with permission, and the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2013.0038.