[Vwoolf] Elizabeth Bowen & Virginia Woolf

[Pat Laurence]

Virginia Woolf advised, “Write biography. Write criticism. Find a new form
for both.” Inspired, I have written a biography, *Elizabeth Bowen, A
Literary Life (*just published by Palgrave Macmillan*)*, with a
“kaleidoscopic” frame. The biography reinvents Bowen as a public
intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and
essayist as well as a writer of fiction. In this biography, I discuss
Bowen’s friendship and conversation with Virginia Woolf.


An excerpt:

Elizabeth Bowen was initially drawn to Virginia Woolf by her laughter (a
kind of “hoot”) and like-minded mischief—as well as by her writing. She
loved her comic exuberance, and their friendship-- based on their lives as
writers-- was “chiefly laughter and pleasure.” Bowen described the pleasure
that “on entering, in her company, into the rapture caused her by the
unexpected, the spectacular, the inordinate, the improbable, and the
preposterous.”  Bowen believed the “spring principle of [Woolf’s] art was
joy.” In 1958, seventeen years after Woolf’s death, she wrote to William
Plomer, a writer-friend on the fringes of Bloomsbury, confiding that only
he seemed “able to bring back Virginia’s laughter—I get so *bored* and
irked by that tragic fiction which has been manufactured about her since
1941.”

[sources in the book]


"Books are built upon books," and mine is no exception. Thanks to the Woolf
list, scholars and writers who have contributed to its making.


Pat Laurence

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