Word: bowens
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...BOWEN'S COURT - Elizabeth Bowen -Knopf ( $3.50 ) . Elizabeth Bowen, excruciatingly sensitive novelist, who has stalked many a ghost in the subcellars and skeleton closets of the mind (The Death of the Heart; To the North), in this book turns from fiction to ponder upon the dead bones of her ancestors. Bowen' s Court is 1) the history of the rise & fall of the Anglo-Irish gentry, as exemplified in ten generations of Bowens; 2) the story of Novelist Bowen's passionate attachment to Bowen's Court, the square, empty, echoing 18th-Century family mansion which "like...
With Cromwell to Cork. The book is also a coolly masochistic self-revelation of Novelist Bowen. "I am ruled," she says, "by a continuity I cannot see." It is a continuity of spiritual rootlessness; and by "the savage and austere light of a burning world," Author Bowen attempts to explain this rootlessness (a universal malady) in local terms of the Bowens and Ireland...
Ever since the first alien Bowen muscled his way with Cromwell into County Cork, ten generations of Bowen gentry have had a mania for land. For without land the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry had nothing. In Catholic Ireland, they were spiritual aliens, "people of the ruins...
Colonel Henry Bowen, the founder of the family fortune, was a half-crazy, atheistic, marauding Welsh adventurer who abandoned his Puritan wife to take part in Cromwell's invasion of Ireland...
When the English invaders divvied up the best Irish lands, Henry settled down on his share, a small estate in the northern part of County Cork. There he established the Bowen dynasty which for 250 years lived defensively on its ingrown clannishness. Those were years of an "intense, centripetal life . . . isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical facts of space...