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Though not a literary giant of the stature of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen is an important twentieth-century literary figure whose fiction has been well received. In presenting the complex truths of human relationships that are her central concerns, that fiction typically attends carefully to realistic details of both character and place. Indeed, in her best stories as well as in her novels Bowen unobtrusively steers readers through the geography of motives and interactions on which human identity and human character depend.
Elizabeth Bowen was born 7 June 1899 in Dublin, but her family home was Bowen's Court, near Kildorrey, County Cork, Ireland. Since the eighteenth century this ancestral home, built by the third Henry Bowen, had been the place that Elizabeth Bowen claimed had "made all the succeeding Bowens." The family can be traced to Welsh, not English, forebears, but critics and biographers have considered her heritage, as did Bowen herself, "classic Anglo-Irish." This heritage was inherently paradoxical: having both Dublin and rural residences, the family lived in a country house yet was separated from the indigenous people by politics and religion.
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