How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War

The career of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has been hard to categorize. As an Anglo-Irish writer, a follower of the modernists but not technically one herself; as an independent woman writer but not, by her admission, a feminist; and as a creative writer in time of war, she has eluded compartmentalization. In How Will the Heart Endure, Heather Bryant Jordan provides a new assessment of Bowen’s achievement, arguing that Bowen’s response to war is the best lens for elucidating the relation between art and life expressed in Bowen’s work.
Bowen created novels, short stories, essays, and autobiographical works in a war-torn world that saw successively the Troubles in Ireland, the Irish Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The strains she felt as a result of these experiences were expressed in the intensely personal vision of loss and betrayal that her fiction conveys.
Jordan’s study combines historical and literary analysis and incorporates new archival research on Bowen’s correspondence and on her war reports to the Ministry of Information. How Will the Heart Endure offers not only a new reading of Bowen’s work, but an insightful look into the wartime publishing climate in which Bowen and her circle–which included Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John and Rosalind Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Stephen Spender–operated. It will be of interest to specialists in modern British fiction, women’s studies, Irish studies, and Anglo-Irish literature.