1950s Collected Impressions by Elizabeth Bowen With Als Decorative Book

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Title: Collected Impressions.
Author: Elizabeth Bowen.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf.
Place: New York.
Publication date: 1950.

Description: 169 p. 8vo. … Read more Title: Collected Impressions.
Author: Elizabeth Bowen.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf.
Place: New York.
Publication date: 1950.

Description: 169 p. 8vo. First edition (1950). Blue publisher's cloth hardcover, gilt title stamped on spine cover, ownership inscription on the front free endpaper reads "Dorothea Walker". Folded in front endpapers is a 14 Dec 1952 NY Times Book Review newspaper article written by Bowen and a 19 Nov 1951 handwritten letter (2 page correspondence on 3 sides) on Hotel Florence (Missoula, Montana) stationary signed by the author addressed to her friend Mrs. Walker.

Measures: .75 W x 5.75 D x 8.75 H inches.

Brief author bio: Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (1899-1973) was a novelist, short story writer and essayist. She was born in Dublin, Ireland to an upper class Anglo-Irish family. Bowen is regarded by many critics as on of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. One critic commented that her imaginative settings are firmly within the world of the English upper middle-class and the Anglo-Irish ascendency. It is clear that Bowen identified herself as Anglo-Irish and much of her writing is focused on life in the Big House, lamenting the decline of that class. A representative example of the Big House theme is Death of the Heart (1938), considered her best known book. Within, she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.

Elizabeth Bowen’s literary fame rests mostly on her achievements in fiction; however, she also wrote numerous reviews, prefaces, and personal essays throughout her career. The pieces in Collected Impressions capture the breadth and depth of her engagement with literature past and present, ranging as they do from Flaubert and LeFanu to Woolf and Lawrence, with many obscure and illustrious names in between. Within Collected Impressions, the reader may anticipate reflecting upon Bowen's powers of perception as a reviewer . Reading a famous author’s reflections on others’ works additionally provides a glimpse into the writer’s creative process and psyche.

Although Bowen’s novels have rarely been out of print, she is hardly a household name in Ireland today. People may be familiar with The Last September because it was turned into a film in 1999, screenplay by John Banville. It is an elegiac evocation of Big House life in Ireland. In The Last September, Bowen drew on her childhood summers at Bowen’s Court (Bowen family seat, 1770s - 1950s) and other autobiographical elements, such as her short-lived engagement to a British army officer in 1921 during the War of Independence. The main theme of the novel is the passing of the way of life of the Anglo-Irish gentry that seemed to parallel her life as she abandoned Bowen's Court leaving unpaid wages and bills. Some Irish readers are drawn to this Irish version of antebellum romanticism of a lost cause, while others see this as a reason to disapprove of Elizabeth Bowen.

Provenance: Dorothea Walker (1907-2000), fellow writer and longtime contributing editor for Vogue and House & Garden magazines. Ownership passed to David Pleydell-Bouverie (1911-1994), English aristocrat who made a name for himself as a British Modernist architect. He married American heiress and socialite Ava Alice Muriel Astor (1902-1956), daughter of John Jacob Astor IV and Ava Loel Willing, on 12 May 1946. During the Gilded Age, marrying British aristocrats was seen as a way for 'American Dollar Princesses' to raise their social status in return for much-needed wealth to an aristocrat, as speculated in this case based upon the inheritance custom of primogeniture in England previous to 1925. He and Ava Alice Muriel Astor were divorced in 1952. In 1978, David Pleydell-Bouverie donated the Bouverie Preserve, his large and ecologically diverse property of 535-acres in Glenn Ellen known for chaparral and riparian forests, waterfalls and magnificent spring wildflower blooms for conservation and education purposes to the Audubon Canyon Ranch (ACR). He passed away on 5 Dec 1994 in Glen Ellen, Sonoma, Ca, USA. Ownership passed to the dC&A collection on 18 July 2021.

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