[In] the stylishness of Elizabeth Bowen's art, one senses the dislocated child who is urgently seeking an identity as a means of survival, and who sometimes strikes that "kind of farouche note which one associates with teen-age delinquents about to break prison—that is, leave home," as her friend Sean O'Faolain said. As Miss Bowen asserts in her most famous novel, The Death of the Heart, "Illusions are art … and it is by art that we live, if we do." The recurrent theme of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction is man's primary need for an illusion, an image of himself, in order for him to be. Her fascination with problems of identity has its source in the experience of her early life, and it often finds its expression in allusions to the story of the early life of man, the story of the fall from the garden of Eden; for both are stories of the need to be, the loss of innocence, the acquisition of knowledge through loss, and the entrance into selfhood. (p. 18)
She showed her own fascination with [her background as a motherless only child, shuffled between England and Ireland,] by writing three works of nonfiction specifically about it—Seven Winters (1943), "a fragment of autobiography" … describing her life with her mother and father in Dublin until she was seven; Bowen's Court (1942, 1964), a history of her family home, where she spent her summers; and The Shelbourne Hotel (1951), a history of the cosmopolitan focus of Anglo-Irish life—and one early novel, The Last September, set during the Troubles. The biographical and historical experiences described in these books inform all of Miss Bowen's fiction. (p. 20)
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