A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

Selected and Introduced by Tessa Hadley

The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul

Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them

Like Woolf, like Spark, her language is clear but her effects complex, creating shimmering reflections of reality, her world recognisable but just out of reach

[Bowen's] fiction's uniqueness lies in its versatile, modern understanding of place as 'inner landscape'... [an] astute selection of the short stories... [Brown] write[s] fiction with the texture of history

Elizabeth Bowen (Author) Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion 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.

'Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them' Vogue 
 
SELECTED AND WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY 
 
A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil. 
 
Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen's finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen's ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen's native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz. 
 
Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body.

Collected Stories

Elizabeth Bowen

A beautiful hardback edition of the collected stories of one of the best short-story writers ever, with a new introduction by John Banville.

She is a major writer; her name should appear on any responsible list of the ten most important fiction writers in English on this side of the Atlantic in this century. She is what happened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Irish Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

Bowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul.

Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of  the naked crystals which have formed them.

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There is not a story in this substantial volume ... that is not brought off beautifully.'  A substantial volume indeed, Including 79 stories written over four decades, ranging in setting from the County Cork of the author's Anglo-Irish childhood to bomb-ravaged London where she coolly sat out the War, evoked with vivid and impeccable artistry. She has a disturbing sense of the uncanny, an acute eye for social comedy and her often emotionally secretive characters are depicted with penetrating psychological insight. She is good at houses, ghosts, children, animals ... 900 pages of sheer delight

Friends And Relations

A tangle of friends and relations gives us Bowen's most personal and domestic novel

Bowen is a tough old bird. And once you're on her side, it's going to be a loyal alliance. Because it's nice to have a writer who will never lie to you. Not even to make you feel a little better

Bowen wrote numerous great novels, including Friends and Relations...about how telephones have infiltrated our thinking and desires: waiting for a call, being interrupted by a call, not knowing what might be announced

There is much to savour, enjoy, intrigue and shock in this wonderful novel. Bowen is sublime

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited. 
 
Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel(1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles(1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris(1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day(1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelborne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark(1965) and her last book Eva Trout (1969). 
 
She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Two sisters, two weddings, just months apart. These marriages produce a tangle of friends, relations and lovers that starts to unravel ten years later, during one intense week. Two of Bowen’s most memorable characters are in attendance: Lady Elfrida, a creature of privilege, and Theodora Thirdman, a gawky teenager with zero self-awareness. The sunset of prosperity is upon this complacent, moneyed class, but Bowen’s precise and beautiful prose pins real pain and comedy upon its inhabitants.

A World Of Love

Intense and emotional, the story of a young girl's romantic awakening

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.

The Shelbourne

The history of Dublin's famous Shelbourne Hotel, told by one of Ireland's most brilliant novelists

For Elizabeth Bowen, the world-famous novelist (who wrote a book about it), the Shelbourne was the "prototype for all large hotels - I cannot help comparing all others with it. Perhaps indeed in no other capital city does any one hotel play such an outstanding role"

Elizabeth Bowen takes us on a tour through the history of the famous Dublin landmark, the Shelbourne Hotel, in this evocative account of Irish life. Looking out on Dublin as if from the windows of the Shelbourne, and then turning inward to witness the impact of events on the hotel, its guests and staff, Bowen paints a picture of what was, in the hotel's earlier days, the second city of the Empire, then the battleground of Irish independence and civil strife, and eventually the capital of a republic.

Bowen's Court & Seven Winters

'Bowen had a genius for conveying the reader straight into the most powerful and complex regions of the heart. On that terrain, she was bold, empathetic and merciless' - New York Times

She startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh

Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell the family house she loved. Bowen reviews ten generations of her family, representatives of the Protestant Irish gentry whose lives were dominated by property, lawsuits, formidable matriarchs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking, and self-destructive fantasies. 
 
Seven Winters recalls with endearing candour Bowen's family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyes of a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds.

The Hotel

The first novel from one of the twentieth century's most admired and stylish writers

The worlds Bowen creates are so immediately absorbing, the glimpses she allows us of the eccentricities of other people's relationships so fascinating, that one cannot help wanting more

Those qualities which Elizabeth Bowen's prose exemplifies: a formidable precision of writing, a faithful delineation of mood and place - an aspiration towards the absolute truthfulness of the individual vision-If there is anything to the catchphrase "life felt", it is here - in Elizabeth Bowen's munificence of detail, the fine closeness of the atmosphere which she creates

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

It's the balmy days of the 1920s and where could be more pleasant for a holiday than a hotel on the Italian Riviera? Filled with prosperous English visitors, the Hotel offers a closed world of wealth and comfort. It also provides the stage for the display of social niceties, for passionate but unspoken love affairs and for the comedy of the shared bathroom. With great wit and insight Elizabeth Bowen's first novel lays bare the intricacies and eccentricities of polite society.

To The North

The fourth novel by Elizabeth Bowen, described by the Guardian as 'One of the last century's greatest woman writers'

To the North and The Death of the Heart are among the finest novels of her generation

A lavishness of imagination is brought to bear upon small moments, and the writing is of such intensity that a character is revealed in one expression, a way of life disclosed in a single scene

Haunting novels of bad faith and betrayal

She startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh...Out of the plainest things - the drawing of a curtain - she can make something electric and urgent

Cecilia, capricious and unable to love, inches reluctantly towards a second marriage to the kind, passionless Julian Tower. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Emmeline, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Markie's appearance disrupts the lives of both women, but in the pain of misunderstanding, it is Emmeline who reveals her vulnerability in a violent and tragic act. 
 
Reissued alongside The Hotel and The Little Girls

The Little Girls

A captivating novel of childhood, friendship and the passage of time, from one of the twentieth century's most admired writers

The Little Girls is intense and the language has bite

There is that recurring shiver of delight...for this story is poetic in its awareness, its stimulus, its beauty of writing; and as full of clues, hints and half-revealed secrets as any thriller

Elizabeth Bowen's mastery of the shape and form and talk of the world around her combines with her miraculous psychological insight to give us moments of sudden vision

In 1914 they had been eleven years old; three little girls at St Agatha's, a day school on the South Coast. Fifty years later, Dinah, beautiful as ever, advertises in the national newspapers to find the other two – Clare, now established with a successful business, and Sheila, a married woman, glossy, chic and correct. Can friendship can be taken up where it was left off? What are the revelations - and the dangers - in summoning up childhood?

The House in Paris

A  timeless masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere that represents the very best of Bowen's work.

A compelling story, inspired with a deep insight into human nature

Her most atmospheric book . . . very eerie and richly descriptive

It seems like [Bowen] is writing pretty conventional novels, they have chapters, they seem to be about recognizable people in recognizable situations, but the syntax of her sentences is completely baroque, they double back on themselves, they twist into cubist sculptures... She's someone who's had a huge influence on my work

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

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.

Celebrated for her much-admired novels, including The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart, Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century's writers equally through her short fiction.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. N. WILSON 
 
Throughout these seventy-nine stories - love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in an oeuvre which reveals, as Angus Wilson affirms in his introduction, that 'the instinctive artist is there at the very heart of her work'.

The Death Of The Heart

Bowen's best known book. A piercing story of innocence betrayed.

Bowen is "the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."

Ironic comedy as well as tragedy, The Death of the Heart tells a story as old as wickedness: the world's betrayal of innocence

Bowen had a genius for conveying the reader straight into the most powerful and complex regions of the heart

'One of the best novels about a young woman that I&rsquo;ve ever read' Greta Gerwig 
 
When sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home. There she encounters the attractive cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and he fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal - and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature. 
 
'One of the last century's greatest woman writers' Guardian 
 
'This is a stunning portrait of the human heart, a raw account of romantic betrayal and the pains of growing up' Sunday Times **One of the 50 best books of the past 100 years**

Eva Trout

Elizabeth Bowen's last novel, a character study of startling originality which many consider to be her best work

Resonant, beautiful and often very funny... Eva is triumphantly real, a creation of great imaginative tenderness

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the handful of great English novelist of this century and must be ranked beside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Ford Madox Ford

Eva is the larger-than-life, some would say monstrous, culmination of a subject that haunted Bowen's work: the neglected, or misplaced, child

I still remember the electrifying effect it had upon me when it was published in 1969. At various stages of life I have become almost possessed by it... The book shimmers with life in every paragraph

A subtle, elusive novel making its mysterious way forward by side glances and half-gleams, by sudden small illuminations and half-hidden ironies, by a tenderness that is half-mocking and a mockery that is half-tender

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY 
 
Imposing, rich, unloved and with a genius for unreality; Eva Trout has a 'capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her' that is endless. Eva Trout was Elizabeth Bowen's last completed novel, and in it her elegant style, her gift for social comedy and her intense sensibility combine to create one of her most formidable - and moving - heroines.

The Last September

Genteel life at 'the 'Big House' continues while the Irish War of Independence rages beyond the gates, but for how long?

A book I read only some years ago, and was astonished by its modernity, its formidable intelligence and its punk sensibility, was The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

A strongly autobiographical portrait of a lost class marking out its final moments - every garden party, every house guest and every flirtation is touched by a sense of impending extinction

When I read [The Last September] I was knocked out by the sheer magnificence of her writing, the cinematic possibilities, and her obsession with the minutiae and the detail of life... I was totally gripped by the story

Posterity will one day return to Miss Bowen's novels as a repository of clues to the inner life of our times

A combination of social comedy and private tragedy...brilliant description of Anglo-Irish life at the troublesome time of 1920

She is a major writer; her name should appear on any responsible list of the ten most important fiction writers on this side of the Atlantic this century. She is what happened after Bloomsbury...the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark

Like Chekhov's plays about the dying years of Russian feudalism, The Last September captures the silliness, the snobbery, the perfect manners, the determination not to show their feelings, the denial, and the ending of the way of life of Bowen's circle

'The Last September catches the languid yet curiously valiant mode of life at the big house just as its demolition was at hand'

Read Elizabeth Bowen’s accessible feminist take on the Irish aristocracy 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIA GLENDINNING 
 
The Irish troubles rage, but up at the 'Big House', tennis parties, dances and flirtations with the English officers continue, undisturbed by the ambushes, arrests and burning country beyond the gates. Faint vibrations of discord reach the young girl Lois, who is straining for her own freedom, and she will witness the troubles surge closer and reach their irrevocable, inevitable climax.

A Time in Rome

'A great writer...she is what happened after Bloomsbury...the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark' Victoria Glendinning

A still ludicrously underrated genius of 20th-century British-Irish writing

One of the last century's greatest woman writers

Her writings convey the flavour of literary London in the Thirties and Forties

Elizabeth Bowen's account of a time spent in Rome is no ordinary guidebook but an evocation of a city - its history, its architecture and, above all, its atmosphere. She describes the famous classical sites, conjuring from the ruins visions of former inhabitants and their often bloody activities and speculates about the immense noise of ancient Rome, the problems caused by the Romans' dining posture, and the Roman temperament. She evokes the city's moods - by day, when it is characterised by golden sunlight, and at night, when the blaze of the moon 'annihilates history'.

The Mulberry Tree

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. She is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September, Joining Charles, another book of short stories, Friends and Relations, To the North, The Cat Jumps, The House of Paris, The Death of the Heart, Look at All Those Roses, The Demon Lover, The Heat of the Day, Collected Impressions, The Shelbourne, A World of Love, A Time in Rome, After-thought, The Little Girls, A Day in the Dark and Eve Trout. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973. 
 
Hermione Lee grew up in London, was educated at Oxford, began her academic career as a lecturer in Williamsburg, Virginia and at Liverpool, and taught at the University of York from 1977, where she was Professor of English until her recent appointment to the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. She is well-known as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster. From 1982 to 1986 she presented Channel Four's first books programme, Book Four. Her publications include a critical study of the novels of Virgina Woolf, a book on Philip Roth, a biography of Willa Cather, a popular two-volume anthology of short stories by women writers, The Secret Self, and numerous editions, of Bowen, Woolf, Stevie Smith, Welty, Wharton, Kipling and others. Her biography of Virgina Woolf was published in 1996 and was greeted with great acclaim. It was chosen as a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, and short-listed for the W H Smith Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography in the USA. Elizabeth Bowen was first published in 1981 and revised in 1999 for Bowen's centenary.

This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant, and unpublished letters to close friends as Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, written with as much elegance and energy as her 'public' writing. In her introduction, Hermoine Lee shows how these writings display the same interests as Elizabeth Bowen's fiction - in Anglo-Irish dispossession and ambivalence, in the persistence of chilhood feelings, in treachery, ghosts, and the mysterious power of place, the lure of nostalgia , and the clash between individual and society.

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught the nuances of the unnameable new sensations Londoners experienced

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

A haunting portrayal of love and betrayal in a London hollowed by war. 
 
It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble. 
 
&lsquo;Alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death&rsquo; London Review of Books 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROY FOSTER 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition

Elizabeth Bowen

Praise for The Heat of the Day

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Books by Elizabeth Bowen

Series by Elizabeth Bowen

Against War

Articles featuring Elizabeth Bowen

12 short story collections to sink into

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