Short Story Wednesday-"The Visitor" Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen is a wonderful writer. Her novel A DEATH OF THE HEART is a masterpiece to me. She wrote many great stories as well as novels. 

"The Visitor" is the story of a nine-year old boy, who is staying with two spinster neighbors, waiting for his mother to die. Bowen describes the house he is staying in and everything about it in exquisite detail and you feel, like the boy, that these details are putting off the inevitable news that his mother is dead. He watches his father striding through the fields half-mad with grief; he remembers the wonderful hours just a year before that his mother and he had spent time together in this very place; he helps his hosts sort apples; he ruminates on his school life. And waits. Every detail seems to be preparing the ground for THE NEWS. This is a subtle story. The sense of dread though permeates every word. How wonderful to write like Bowen.
 

 

Novels

• The Hotel (1927)
• The Last September (1929)
• Friends and Relations (1931)
• To the North (1932)
• The House in Paris (1935)
• The Death of the Heart (1938)
• The Heat of the Day (1949)
• A World of Love (1955)
• The Little Girls (1964)
• Eva Trout (1968)

Short story collections

• Encounters (1923)
• Ann Lee's and Other Stories (1926)
• Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929)
• The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934)
• Look at All Those Roses (1941)
• The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)
• Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (1946, USA)
• Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (1959)
• A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965)
• The Good Tiger (1965, children's book) - illustrated by M. Nebel (1965 edition) and Quentin Blake (1970 edition)
• Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories (1978)
• The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1980)
• The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) - edited by Allan Hepburn

Nonfiction

• Bowen's Court (1942, 1964)
• Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942)
• English Novelists (1942)
• Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement (1946)
• Why Do I Write?: An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (1948)
• Collected Impressions (1950)
• The Shelbourne (1951)
• A Time in Rome (1960)
• Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (1962)
• Pictures and Conversations (1975), edited by Spencer Curtis Brown
• The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (1999), edited by Hermione Lee
• "Notes on Éire": Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill by Elizabeth Bowen, 1940–1942 (2008), edited by Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford
• People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2008) - edited by Allan Hepburn
• Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries, 1941–1973 (2009), edited by Victoria Glendinning and Judith Robertson
• Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (2010), edited by Allan Hepburn
• Elizabeth Bowen's Selected Irish Writings (2011), edited by Éibhear Walshe
• The Weight of a World of Feeling: Reviews and Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2016), edited by Allan Hepburn

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK

Jerry House 

George Kelley 

Richard Robinson 

Todd Mason