Bowen in Italy

Elizabeth Bowen's letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. In ‘Pictures and Conversations’, Bowen explores the importance of the location in her fiction: ‘the locale of the happening [which] always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it’ (PC 37). Italy provided the ‘locale’ for many significant events in her own life: the breaking off of an engagement or the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; when facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court, or when mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. This chappter draws on Bowen’s experiences in Italy, placing her writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.