(7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish novelist and short story writer.
Elizabeth Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 at 15 Herbert Place in Dublin, Ireland
and was baptized in the nearby St Stephen's Church on Upper Mount Street. Her parents Henry Charles Cole Bowen and Florence Colley Bowen later brought her to Bowen's Court at Farahy, near Kildorrery
, County Cork
where she spent her summers.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.