Eva Trout

Description

Elizabeth Bowen's last novel, a character study of startling originality which many consider to be her best work WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY Imposing, rich, unloved and with a genius for unreality; Eva Trout has a 'capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her' that is endless. Eva Trout was Elizabeth Bowen's last completed novel, and in it her elegant style, her gift for social comedy and her intense sensibility combine to create one of her most formidable - and moving - heroines.

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Resonant, beautiful and often very funny... Eva is triumphantly real, a creation of great imaginative tenderness * Financial Times * Elizabeth Bowen was one of the handful of great English novelist of this century and must be ranked beside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Ford Madox Ford -- Edmund White * Washington Post * Eva is the larger-than-life, some would say monstrous, culmination of a subject that haunted Bowen's work: the neglected, or misplaced, child * New York Times * I still remember the electrifying effect it had upon me when it was published in 1969. At various stages of life I have become almost possessed by it... The book shimmers with life in every paragraph -- A. N. Wilson * Daily Telegraph * A subtle, elusive novel making its mysterious way forward by side glances and half-gleams, by sudden small illuminations and half-hidden ironies, by a tenderness that is half-mocking and a mockery that is half-tender * Evening Standard *