The Hotel: Elizabeth Bowen’s 1927 Debut

Who Was Elizabeth Bowen? Her Debut Novel The Hotel and its Impact

Elizabeth Bowen isn’t nearly as well-known as her more famous contemporaries like Virginia Woolf or Graham Greene, but the 1958 nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature has an interesting place in literary history just the same.

To be sure, Elizabeth Bowen was a pretty privileged lady whose early life section on Wikipedia is full of hyperlinks to other prominent people and places in Ireland. She was friends with famous artists and writers her whole life; two childhood pals include the famous Irish artists Sylvia Cooke-Collis and Mainie Jellet. She had a lot of writer pals that visited her, including Woolf and Carson McCullers and Iris Murdoch and Eudora Welty.

That privilege shows up in her writing fairly often, as she wrote about the lives led by upper middle-class British people. Bowen also wrote about the so-called “big house” that refers to how influential and monied people lived in the big country houses and estates in Ireland, offering a unique glimpse into how the rich well-to-do Irish people lived and talked.   

Speaking of the big house, Elizabeth was the first woman and last owner of Bowen’s Court, a stately house built in Ireland in the 1770s and was even attacked during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Elizabeth was pretty overwhelmed with all the costs and labor it took to keep up with the house after her husband passed, and sold it to a developer who demolished the building in 1960.

As a writer and a kind of academic socialite, Elizabeth kept a pretty busy life and was well-accoladed. She became a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1937, was awarded the CBE in 1948, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970 for her final novel Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes. Anthony Burgess, none other than the dude who wrote A Clockwork Orange, said of Bowen’s 1948 novel The Heat of the Day, “No novel has better caught the atmosphere of London during the Second World War.”

Anyway, The Hotel (1927) was Elizabeth Bowen’s debut novel, and while it is not her most famous book, some of her skill as a writer is already obvious here. It’s particularly notable in the way she describes architecture, where the buildings are characters themselves, taking on memories and feelings and emotions of those who are inhabiting the building at that point in time. The Hotel has evoked comparisons to E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, as they are both about a group of English tourists living it up abroad.   



Not much really happens in The Hotel plot-wise, but there’s a whole lot of hidden tension underneath the polite conversations. Uncertainty and misunderstanding that isn’t really talked about is pretty prevalent here, and the awkward conversations and hesitations only add to all that unspoken tension. Readers who have noticed Bowen’s ability to create this kind of suspense through that kind of psychology may be reminded of more modern writers like Kazuo Ishiguro or Ian McEwan.

As she once put it, Elizabeth like to write about “life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off.” She understood how mundane routine conversations can carry much more meaning when there are emotions simmering underneath the superficial, and it’s just as much how you said it, and what you didn’t say, that matters more than what you actually said. Ordinary conversations are loaded with emotional undercurrents, and sometimes they never come to the surface at all. Bowen’s gift at capturing this tension was remarkable.

The Hotel announced Elizabeth Bowen as a major literary talent upon its publication in 1927, and established her signature style of blending literally modernism with accessibility and conventional narrative structures through her elegant prose and atmospheric settings. Her voice is all but fully formed here, laying a strong foundation of the psychological realism that would make her one of the most admired — and underrated — prose stylists of her generation.

If you’re interested in learning more about Elizabeth Bowen, we also covered her classic of the Irish War of Independence The Last September.

Click to buy your own copy of The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen!

Cover Image Credit: Background image of the Grand Hotel in Rimini, Italy is circa 2015 and by Il Malatestiano and is licensed under  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license per Wikimedia Commons. The original photograph of Elizabeth Bowen used for the cover image is from the 1960s and the photographer is unknown. It is Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0.), and found on Wikimedia Commons.

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