The British writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) dealt with the strivings of the individual will to fulfill itself in an alien and hostile world. She is considered a major British novelist of the 20th century.

Born in Dublin on June 7, 1899, Elizabeth Bowen lived in Ireland until the age of seven, when her family moved to England. Her education completed, she returned to Dublin in 1916 to work in a hospital for World War I veterans. Two years later she moved back to England and enrolled in the London County Council School of Art. In 1923 she married Alan Charles Cameron and published her first collection of short stories.

In 1925 Bowen and her husband moved to Oxford, where she became friends with many literary intellectuals, among them Isaiah Berlin and Lord David Cecil. There she wrote her first four novels: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), Friends and Relations (1931), and To the North...