The Heat of the Day

Elizabeth Bowen was a significant Anglo-Irish novelist in the early 20th century. She was born in Dublin in 1899 to a landowning family with a stately home in County Cork. She split her time between London and Ireland. Her most well-known work is The Last September (1929), which addresses the issue of the Irish aristocracy and the effect of the “Big House” culture of landowning Protestants on the largely Catholic working class.

Her fiction also deals extensively with the effect of war on Europe. She experienced both World War I (WWI) and WWII, and her works explores the effects of both conflicts on Europe and its inhabitants, as well as the complexities of the Interwar period. Her other major works of fiction include To the North (1920), which takes place in 1920s London; The House in Paris (1935), which chronicles a single day in Paris just after WWI; The Death of the Heart (1938), which features an orphan who goes to live in London during the Interwar period; and Eva Trout (1968), about a young woman in England who inherits a large fortune. She also published a nonfiction text, Bowen’s Court (1942), which detailed the history of her family home.

Bowen was the only woman to inherit Bowen’s Court during its history. She lived primarily in England after 1907, but visited Ireland often. She married Alan Cameron in 1923, in a relationship that was described as passionless but amicable. She had several extramarital affairs, including with Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin and a Canadian diplomat. During WWII, she worked for the Ministry of Information in London and served as an air raid warden, experiences that informed some of the material in The Heat of the Day. Bowen died in 1973 in London.