Bowen’s Court was published by Longmans in 1942. It is a non-fiction history of Bowen’s own family — the Bowens of Bowen’s Court, County Cork — from the establishment of the house in 1775 through seven generations to Elizabeth Bowen herself. The book is simultaneously family history, social history of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, architectural study, and personal memoir.
Bowen traces each generation of Bowens: their marriages, their politics, their relationships with the local Irish Catholic community, their gradual economic decline. The house itself — built in the Palladian style by Henry Cole Bowen I — is treated as a character: it embodies the Ascendancy’s simultaneous grandeur and precariousness, its rootedness in Irish soil and its alienation from Irish life.
Bowen wrote the book during World War II, aware that the class she was documenting was in its final phase. (She herself would be the last Bowen to live at Bowen’s Court; she sold it in 1959, and the buyer demolished it in 1960.) The book’s tone is neither apologetic nor celebratory — it is the tone of someone documenting a species before its extinction, with the biologist’s mix of fascination and detachment.
Collecting Bowen’s Court
First edition (Longmans, London, 1942): Boards with dust jacket. Wartime printing.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $40–$100