The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

ELIZABETH BOWEN died in 1973 at the age of seventy-three. I recall meeting her once in London and once in the United States. She was intensely civilized, gracious, and emanated an aura of goodwill. I fear that she is not widely read at this time, and I find that to be a great loss. Her best works were the novels The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949), as well as a marvelous volume of short stories Ivy Gripped the Steps (1945). It may be that the shadows of Henry James and of Virginia Woolf, who befriended Bowen, are too heavy upon the novels, but the stories seem to me, after those of Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, as strong as any composed in Great Britain in the twentieth century.

Bowen had a curious twenty-nine-year marriage to Alan Cameron, who worked as an educational administrator and later for the BBC. It seems to have been amiable, but like the marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, never consummated. Instead Bowen had a long relationship to a Canadian diplomat, Charles Ritchie, and briefer ones to other men and women, including the very minor American poet May Sarton.