The Hotel was published by Constable in 1927, Bowen’s first novel. A group of English tourists inhabiting a hotel on the Italian Riviera (based on Bowen’s own experiences at Bordighera) form a temporary society governed by the same rules as the one they left at home — but compressed, heightened, and stripped of the distractions of ordinary life.
Sydney Warren, a young woman of intelligence and reserve, is the center of multiple attachments: Mrs. Kerr, an older widow, exercises a possessive fascination over her (the relationship hovers at the edge of the erotic without explicitly crossing it); Ronald, a clergyman, proposes marriage; and the novel’s supporting cast — gossiping elderly women, bored young men, socially anxious mothers — provides a chorus of commentary.
The novel’s slightness (Bowen later dismissed it as juvenilia) conceals genuine sharpness: the hotel is a laboratory for observing how English people perform their class positions even when no one is watching, and Sydney’s paralysis between Ronald and Mrs. Kerr anticipates Bowen’s lifelong theme — the woman who cannot choose because choosing means losing part of herself.
Collecting The Hotel
First edition (Constable, London, 1927): Boards with dust jacket. Very small print run.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Without jacket: $150–$400