Since 2022, the Elizabeth Bowen Society organises a birthday lecture on 7th June on the occasion of Bowen’s birthday to rejoice in her being very much present still today. The Society has also hosted an online event about Bowen’s Court, read more about it below.
Birthday Lecture 2024
Eibhear Walshe: “Treading on Bowen’s grave – Writing The Last Day at Bowen’s Court”
On Friday 7th June 2024, we held an online only event to celebrate Bowen’s 125th birthday. We had the great pleasure of welcoming Irish writer and academic Eibhear Walshe as speaker. He discussed his experience of fictionalising the life of Elizabeth Bowen in his 2020 novel, The Last Day at Bowen’s Court, and looked at the way his creative process was helped by his research on Bowen and Ireland and the letters between Bowen and Charles Ritchie. At the centre of his talk were the ways in which fiction can transcend the limits of biography.
Birthday Lecture 2023
Heather Bryant: “An Education of Her Own: The Teaching Life of Elizabeth Bowen”
On Wednesday 7th June 2023, on the occasion of Bowen’s 124th birthday, we celebrated her centenary with a wonderful talk by Heather Bryant. She is a poet, writer, and lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, and is the author of How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War.
We’re very happy to be able to provide a recording of this wonderful event, which is now available here.
Birthday Lecture 2022
Allan Hepburn: “Writing Circles: Correspondence between Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty”
On Tuesday 7th June 2022, on the occasion of Bowen’s 123rd birthday, we hosted our first birthday lecture, in which Professor Allan Hepburn of McGill University talked about the letters between Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty. Hepburn is the editor of several works on Bowen, such as the previously uncollected stories The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008), People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2008), Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (2010), and The Weight of a World of Feeling: Reviews and Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (2016).
The event was held online and Professor Hepburn delighted the attendees with some fabulous photographs of the letters written by both authors and a truly fascinating talk about these women’s close and beautiful friendship.
“An Evening at Bowen’s Court”
On Thursday 30th September 2021, the Elizabeth Bowen Society presented a virtual event with talks by writer and architectural historian David Hicks and by historian Ian D’Alton. Hicks delighted the attendees with an illustrated talk on Elizabeth Bowen’s ancestral home, followed by D’Alton’s short talk about Bowen’s Court (1942), the history of the Bowens and their big house of the same name in County Cork from their arrival in Ireland around the time of the Cromwellian conquest in the seventeenth century to Bowen’s inheritance and later loss of the family home.
You can see some of the pictures on this thread on X we posted at the time of the event.
