Elizabeth Bowen’s family had been settled in Farrahy in North Cork for nearly two hundred years by the time of her birth in 1899 and her fictions reflect this long and difficult history between landlord and landscape.  As she wrote in her family history Bowen’s Court (1942)  ‘The land outside Bowen’s Court’s windows left prints on my ancestors eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me‘.  In all of these Irish writings, Bowen looked homewards to North Cork as a place of stability and loyalty in an endangered world and her vision of Anglo-Ireland becomes her talisman, her source for imaginative power and stability in war-disordered London. This edited collection charts her illuminating relationship with the new Irish state from her perspective as an Anglo-Irish novelist and provides an account of her life-long engagement with her own country from 1929 until the late 1960s.

Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. He is the editor of Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press, 1993), Sex, Nation and Dissent, (Cork University Press, 1997).

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