The Elizabeth Bowen Society is delighted to announce its 2024 international conference.

Recent years have seen a growing and sustained interest in Bowen’s work.  No longer thought of as a writer on the margins of Bloomsbury, Bowen rightly occupies a central place in our understanding of both the twentieth century and twentieth-century literature.

Bowen had passionate attachments to places, especially her family home, Bowen’s Court, but also to Dublin, London, Paris, and Folkestone, although the many upheavals in her life meant it became one often dominated by exile. Her characters are often temporarily located: Portia in The Death of the Heart staying uneasily with her brother and his wife; Leopold and Henrietta in The House in Paris caught, as it were, on the move between places; Lois and the Naylors poised on the moment of their expulsion from Danielstown in The Last September; Emmeline’s facilitation of “dangerous” travel in To the North; Eva Trout’s time in America. Bowen’s non-fiction writing also often focuses on specific locations, for example Bowen’s Court, the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, or Rome. There are many examples of spatial locations, but both temporal and emotional forms of location and dislocation also run throughout Bowen’s work.

We have received a range of interesting abstracts and we are delighted to invite you to the "Locating Elizabeth Bowen" conference at the University's Polhill Campus on 11th May 2024.