The Little Girls

Description

In 1914 they had been eleven years old - Dicey, Mumbo and Sheikie. Nearly fifty years have gone by since they met at St Agatha's, a day school on the South Coast. One of them, Dicey, a beauty to whom time has so far done little, deliberately convenes the other two - Clare, a successful career woman, and Sheila, a glossy matron, cool and correct Can friendship be taken up where it left off? For there is peril in summoning up the violence and mystification's of childhood. Forces which has been latent in all three are brought uncomfortably near to the surface by this reunion. With its wit and its characteristically brilliant texture, the novel is ingeniously constructed. There is little explanation in THE LITTLE GIRLS, but they are many clues. Even inanimate objects can be important, and random sayings or seemingly trivial events may acquire, retrospectively, a strange significance.

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited. Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelbourne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), After-thought (essays 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book, Eva Trout (1969) She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

The Little Girls is intense and the language has bite * The Times * There is that recurring shiver of delight...for this story is poetic in its awareness, its stimulus, its beauty of writing; and as full of clues, hints and half-revealed secrets as any thriller * Scotsman * Elizabeth Bowen's mastery of the shape and form and talk of the world around her combines with her miraculous psychological insight to give us moments of sudden vision -- Angus Wilson