Elizabeth Bowen (Author) ELIZABETH BOWEN was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She wrote many acclaimed novels and short story collections, was awarded the CBE in 1948, and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973.Tessa Hadley (Introducer) Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016 and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

...she’s as good as anyone: better than Woolf, who’s enshrined at the heart of the canon. Bowen is more confidently passionate, without Woolf’s debilitating doubt; her apprehension is more acute; she’s funnier; the flow of her words is more elegantly sure and more original.