NOVELIST IN NEW ROLE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29326, 4 October 1960, Page 2

NOVELIST IN NEW ROLE

Non-Fiction Work By Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen wrote her first short story when She was 20. “From the moment my pen touched paper,” she said, “I thought of nothing but writing and, since then, I have thought of practically nothing else,” writes a London correspondent. She works surely but slowly. Her latest book, a non-fiction piece called “A Time in Rome,” is her first sizeable publication for five years. But, as always, the wait is worth while. Her notices are impeccable. Sixty-one-year-old Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, C.BE., Hon. D Litt (Oxon), was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, but was taken to live in Kent when she was seven.

She still owns, in County Cork, the family’s ancestral seat which was given to one of her ancestors by Cromwell. Its name is Bowen’s Court. Her first novel, “The Hotel,” came in 1927. It was based on “one rather awful winter in an hotel at Bordighera (Italy) where a beloved aunt of mine was wintering and where I had gone to teach her children.”

Other novels—“ Friends and Relations,” “To the North," “The House in Paris”—gained her literary success and in 1949, with “The Heat of the Day,” she was accepted as a major modern novelist

Why isn't her new book a novel? “Attempts to write fiction about Rome have made other writers rhetorical and pompous,” she said. “I had to look out or Rome would have spoiled my style.”