As the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from the night. A seance reveals a ghastly secret in the murk of Regent's Canal. From south of the Thames come chilling reports of a spring-heeled spectre, and in Stoke Newington rumours abound of an opening to another world among the quiet alleys. Join Elizabeth Dearnley on this atmospheric tour through a shadowy London, a city which has long inspired writers of the weird and uncanny. Waiting in the hazy streets are eerie tales from Charlotte Riddell, Lettice Galbraith and Violet Hunt, along with haunting pieces by Virginia Woolf, Arthur Machen, Sam Selvon and many more.

On the face of it the story is about a woman who is given reason to suspect that the man with whom she is in love is betraying his country Another man is on his track, and a triangular situation develops. All the elements of a hunter-and-hunted thriller are here, but what she makes of them is an internal drama of remarkable perception and understanding in a domestic setting in embattled London.

Her imagineative interpretation of the effect of war on the manners, morals and emotions of those not directly engaged in the fighting is drawn from an uncannily poignant recall of the wartime London scene.

A collection of nine of the great Irish writer's stories set in her homeland. One of the most highly regarded novelists of this century and a prolific writer of short stories, she made the short story peculiarly her own and some of her Irish stories -- including "Her Table Spread", "Summer Night", and "The Happy Autumn Fields", all included in this collection, are considered by Glendinning, who was her official biographer, to be among her greatest.

This volume collects for the first time essays published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime as well as essays which have never been published before. The range of subjects alone makes these essays indispensable reading.Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among international delegates scrabbling to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House": owners evacuated during the war return to their houses empty since 1939. Other essays in this volume, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable mid-century evaluations of the state of literature. The essays assembled in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any collection. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period.

TO THE NORTH portrays a classic romantic entanglement of a love sympathetic, honest, well-meaning young woman who cannot resist becoming involved with a man who is patently caddish and predatory. Instriking and richly comic contrast to the turbulence of this passion is the cool, detached atmosphere of the house in St John's Wood in which it takes its course - where the young woman's sister-in-law with her strictly unromantic preoccupations is always near by, the orphaned teenager Pauline presents herself as gawky innocence itself, and the power-loving busybody Lady Waters misses nothing.

This volume collects for the first time essays published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime as well as essays which have never been published before. The range of subjects alone makes these essays indispensable reading.Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among international delegates scrabbling to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House": owners evacuated during the war return to their houses empty since 1939. Other essays in this volume, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable mid-century evaluations of the state of literature. The essays assembled in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any collection. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period.

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads young Jane into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a collection of people held there by ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner. During a hot and dry summer, Jane pursues her romantic imaginings, while not far off the rich, promiscuous Lady Latterly waits to play her part in Jane's awakening.

Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelties of the nuns; the eccentricities of Nanda's school friends.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A.S. BYATT When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers' residence in Paris, little does she know what fascinating secrets the house itself contains. Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the mystery surrounding Leopold, his parents, Henrietta's agitated hostess and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalisingly.

In 1914, three eleven-year-old girls buried a box in a thicket on the coast of England, shortly before World War I sent their lives on divergent paths. Nearly fifty years later, a series of mysteriously-worded classified ads brings the women reluctantly together again. Dinah has grown from a chubby, bossy girl to a beautiful, eccentric widow. The clever, reticent Clare has blossomed into an imperious entrepreneur of independent means. And Sheila--who was once the pretty princess of her small universe--has weathered disappointed aspirations to become a chic and glossily correct housewife.
As these radically different women confront one another and their shared secrets, the hard-won complacencies of their present selves are irrevocably shattered. In a novel as subtle and compelling as a mystery, Elizabeth Bowen explores the buried revelations--and the dangers--that attend the summoning up of childhood and the long-concealed scars of the past.

In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth.

In A World of Love, an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.

Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel, epitomizes her bold exploration of the territory between the comedy of manners and cutting social commentary.

Orphaned at a young age, Eva has found a home of sorts in Worcestershire with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles, and Iseult's husband, Eric. From a safe distance in London, her legal guardian, Constantine, assumes that all's well. But Eva's flighty, romantic nature hasn't entirely clicked with the Arbles household, and Eva is plotting to escape. When she sets out to hock her Jaguar and disappear without a trace, she unwittingly leaves a paper trail for her various custodians–and all kinds of trouble–to follow.

In SEVEN WINTERS Elizabeth Brown recalls with endearing candour her family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyesof a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds. BOWEN'S COURT describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when the author, the last of the Bowens, was forced to sell the house she loved. With the mastery skill that is also the hallmark of her novels she reviews ten generations of Bowens as representative of a class - the Protestant Irish gentry. Their lives were ones of fanatical commitment to property, lawsuits, formidable matriachs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking and breeding, self- destructive and self-sustaining fantasies...