Boland, Eavan Aisling (1944- ) poet, essayist

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, to the painter Frances Kelley and the diplomat Frederick (Frank) H. Boland, whose various posts led the family to London and New York. Boland graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and currently is a member of the English department at Stanford University. She has published more than 10 volumes of poetry, a memoir, numerous pamphlets, and essays and poems in journals in Ireland and America. Her awards include the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and the America Ireland Fund Literary Award.

Boland found that as a woman poet she confronted a male-dominated literary tradition filled with crippling preconceptions and expectations. In her essay collection Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995), she recalls a moment when she saw “that everything which has defined my life up to that moment is something which has not happened. . . . Sometimes on my way to college, or making a detour to have a cup of coffee in the morning, I saw my reflection in a shopwindow. I never liked what I saw. A redheaded girl, always self-conscious, never graceful enough. . . . It was a measure of the confusion I felt, the increasing drain on my purpose and clearheadedness that I hardly ever thought I saw an Irish poet.”

As with other contemporary women poets— Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, for example—Boland turned these concerns into poetry. In Her Own Image (1980), with charcoal drawings by Constance Short, includes poems on anorexia, mastectomy, menstruation, and masturbation. Throughout her poetry Boland challenges herself to make and her readers to follow that difficult and sustaining move from object or icon (Mother Ireland, Housewife) to subject or author.

Another response to Boland’s life and times seems especially apt for the daughter of a diplomat: She addresses the seductions and ravages of power, whether deployed by imperial master, nationalist ideologue, or religious authority. Poetry comes in, Boland says, where myth touches history and language reclaims place. For her place is the point of intersection among myth, history, voice, and silence. She avoids writing about the famous Irish nationalist places, usually the sites of catastrophe, and finds her own versions of what William Butler Yeats calls “befitting emblems of adversity”: the Dublin suburbs, the workhouse in Clonmel where a Boland ancestor was master, the only “administrative” job a Catholic could get, the charity hospital in Dublin where Boland’s grandmother died alone in October 1909.

Boland also composes beautiful, artistic poems rendered as autobiography (“I Remember”), as cautionary tale (“Degas’s Laundresses”), or as moments of pure visual and verbal beauty (“Renoir’s ‘The Grape Pickers’”). In “I Remember” the early memory is captured with imagery drawn specifically from the painter’s tools: “porcupin- ing in a jar / The spines of my mother’s portrait brushes / Spiked from the dirty turpentine…

Finally, Boland is a fine love poet, writing of sexual, romantic, familial, maternal, and domestic love. Among most resonant sentences in Object Lessons is “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.” Some of her love poetry— “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me” and “The Pomegranate,” for instance—comes very close to meeting that demand.

Other Works by Eavan Boland:
- Against Love Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
- The Lost Land. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
- An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1957-87. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
- Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Elizabeth Bowen: Irish Novelist, Short Story Writer & Literary Legacy

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin, Ireland, to Henry Cole and Florence Colley Bowen, aristocrats who lived at Bowen’s Court, an estate that had been in the family since 1653. She was educated at Downe House in Kent, where she came under the tutelage of the novelist Rose Macau- ley, who in turn introduced her to a broader literary community, which included Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, and Aldous Huxley.

In 1923 Bowen married Alan Cameron and published her first book, Encounters, a collection of stories generally about inexperienced young women in difficult situations. She soon followed this with The Hotel (1927), a novel that explores similar themes. In 1929 Bowen moved to London and became acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group, a literary circle whose most prominent member, Virginia Woolf, became one of her dearest friends. At this time Bowen began to establish a literary reputation. The first of her major novels, The Last September (1929), is an engaging study of a young woman attempting to develop her own personality in the confines of an aristocratic family.

Bowen further enhanced her reputation with Friends and Relations (1931), a novel set in Britain that focuses on the social interactions of several upper-class characters. However, she reached the peak of her creative abilities with what are still regarded as her finest novels: The House in Paris (1935), which describes a day-long friendship between two young children; The Death of the Heart (1938), which focuses on a young girl’s ill- fated love for an older, more experienced, and villainous man; and The Heat of the Day (1948), which is based on Bowen’s experiences in World War II.

Although Bowen is primarily remembered as a novelist, she also wrote numerous short stories, of which the most highly acclaimed, including “The Mysterious Kor” and “Demon Lover,” appear in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1981).

Late in her career, at the age of 70, Bowen won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eva Trout (1968), a novel about an eccentric young woman who is accidentally murdered. Despite the prize it received, critics do not regard this as one of Bowen’s best novels. Nevertheless, according to the scholar Siobhan Kilfeather, Bowen will long be remembered for “an extraordinary attention to tradition. Language, conventions, and manners that have been taken for granted she places under stress. She addresses mainstream, middle-class English life as someone sufficiently alienated by race and gender to cast a cold eye upon it.”

Critical Analysis. Siobhan Kilfeather mentions that Bowen promulgates tradition because she continued the rich legacy of the British novel of manners, or realistic stories about the social interactions and conventions of a particular social class. For instance, The Last September describes the social life of Irish aristocrats as they waltz unsettlingly through parties and tennis matches at Danielstown, an ancestral estate; they are totally impervious to the Irish revolution ravaging the country simultaneously. The novel constantly observes its characters, noting even how they sit or stand. In a typical passage, before the beginning of a tennis match, Bowen writes:

Everybody was sitting or standing about . . . there were two courts and eighteen players; they were discussing who was to play first . . . Lois was nowhere; Lawrence sat on the ground smoking and taking no part in the argument. Lady Naylor talked eagerly to a number of guests . . . Livvy Thompson was organizing.

Lois Farquar, noticeably absent in this passage but the central character of Bowen’s novel, is entirely stifled by this environment and longs for change. That finally comes near the novel’s end, when the secondary story of the distant war merges with the actions of the aristocrats at Danielstown as soldiers burn down the old estate. Much of the novel’s appeal stems from Bowen’s masterful interweaving of these dual plots and her use of the fire to force the inhabitants of Danielstown to acknowledge the war and simultaneously end the boring phase of Farquar’s life.

The House in Paris (1935), more than any of Bowen’s other novels, reveals Virginia Woolf’s influence. As Woolf does in To the Lighthouse, Bowen links several disconnected narratives into a single, unified story, and then deftly manipulates time. In The House in Paris, the narratives concern a disastrous love affair and its consequences. The novel, divided into three distinct parts, takes place in a single day, but in its second section it branches into an extended flashback to explain events that took place 10 years earlier. In that earlier time, Bowen deals primarily with Karen Michaelis, who becomes engaged to a man she does not love, has an affair with another woman’s fiance, becomes pregnant, and sends the resultant child to live in Paris after her paramour commits suicide. Although Karen’s fiance knows of the affair, he marries her nonetheless, and she doesn’t see her child for nine years. The child, Leopold, is the focus of the first and third portions of the novel as he arrives at a house in Paris, where he is supposed to meet his mother for the first time. Leopold spends the day playing with Henrietta, a young girl making a travel stop at the same house, but his mother never comes, leaving Leopold weeping “like someone alone against his will, someone shut up alone for a punishment.” According to the scholar Edwin J. Kenney, Jr., Leopold’s “loneliness . . . is for Elizabeth Bowen a metaphor for all human loneliness caused by the combination of fate, of external circumstances, and innocence.”

The Death of the Heart (1939) is about an inexperienced young woman named Portia. With both of her parents dead, she is forced to live with Thomas and Anna Quayne, a childless couple grown callous because of unfulfilled dreams. Neither of the Quaynes are capable of providing Portia the love and support she needs, and she spends the novel unsuccessfully searching for love from several men, most notably a philandering young man named Eddie. The novel’s greatness, according to the scholar Janet Dunleavy, is “[i]ts narrative mode [which] incorporates an expertly handled multiplicity of viewpoints which evoke a multiplicity of responses to a single event or situation.” One such event is Portia’s passion for Eddie. While the two are having a conversation, Bowen reveals that Portia is falling in love:

The force of Eddie’s behaviour whirled her free of a hundred puzzling humiliations, of her hundred failures to take the ordinary cue. She could meet the demands he made with the natural genius of the friend and lover. The impetus under which he seemed to move made life fall, round him and her, into a new poetic order.

In an ensuing passage, however, Bowen quickly turns her attention to Eddie, revealing that to him, Portia’s love is something of a tool that will allow him to diminish his roguish reputation: “For Eddie, Portia’s love seemed to refute the accusations that had been brought against him for years.”

In addition to her novels, Bowen is also well known for her short stories. Some of the most noteworthy are found in The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), a collection of stories about London during World War II. In Siobhan Kilfeather’s words, the stories “are justly celebrated for their evocations of the fear in London, as the city comes to terms with danger.” “The Mysterious Kor,” for instance, describes a paralyzed and frightening London during the German blitz as two characters, Pepita and Arthur, wander the city’s streets pretending that London is a lost city in Africa, dreading their return to a crowded and claustrophobic apartment. Bowen develops the horrible psychological effect of the war by describing what would otherwise be a pleasant moonlit London night in military terms: “Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless.” To avoid the feeling of dangerous exposure suggested in this passage, Bowen writes that “People stayed indoors with a fervour that could be felt: the buildings strained with battened-down human life, but not a beam, not a voice, not a note from a radio escaped.”

Other Works by Elizabeth Bowen:
- Little Girls. 1963. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1992.
- A Time in Rome. 1959. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1990.
- To the North. 1932. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1997.

Works about Elizabeth Bowen:
- Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
- Hoogland, Renee C. Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
- Jordan, Heather Bryant. Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.