Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 7, 1899. The daughter of aristocratic, Anglo-Irish parents, Bowen divided time between the family's Dublin home and Bowen's Court, their estate in County Cork, Ireland, during her early childhood. This ended, however, when Bowen's father was hospitalized for mental illness, and she and her mother went to England to stay with relatives until he recovered. In 1912, just as she and her family were to be reunited, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died shortly afterwards.

Bowen was sent to England to be raised in the care of her mother's extended family. She attended Downe House Boarding School in Kent, and then went on to the London Council School of Art from 1918 to 1919. While in London, she began to work seriously on her writing. In 1923 she married professor Alan Charles Cameron and published her first collection of...