The Elizabeth Bowen Review – Volume 7
We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 7 (November 2025) of The Elizabeth Bowen Review.
The essays in this volume all arise from conference papers given at the ‘Elizabeth Bowen: Blurring Boundaries’ conference held at the University of Bedfordshire on 11th May 2024. The conference was supported by the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance, and the School of Education and English at the University of Bedfordshire and was co-organised by Ann Rae, Nick Turner and Nicola Darwood.
You can read the full volume online here.
Essay Competition 2025
The editors of the Elizabeth Bowen Review would now like to invite undergraduate and postgraduate students to submit essays that focus on Bowen’s life or work for the 2025 Essay Competition. Essays should be no more than 4,000 words in length (excluding reference list) and use the Harvard referencing system. The essay should be submitted by email to bowen@beds.ac.uk by 11.59pm on 30th April 2026 with the subject line ‘Essay competition 2025’.
The submitted essays will be judged by a panel, and the winner will have the opportunity to work with the editors so that the essay can be published in either Volume Eight or Nine of the Review. The winning essayist will be announced in Volume Eight.
For more information, please contact the editors, Dr Nick Turner and Dr Nicola Darwood, at bowen@beds.ac.uk.
Annual Evensong 2025
The Annual Choral Evensong in Commemoration of Elizabeth Bowen took place on Sunday, 14 September, at St Colman’s Church, Farahy, at 3:30pm. You can read here a lovely review of the service written by board member Nuala O’Connor.
Annual Birthday Lecture
We’re happy to announce that for this year’s Birthday Lecture professor Jessica Gildersleeve will be joining us to talk about Bowen’s Christmas short stories. The event will be held online on the 7th of June at 7pm BST. Come and celebrate with us! Register now for free on the link below.
“Christmas at Bowen’s Court: Elizabeth Bowen’s Christmas Ghost Stories”
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres,” Jerome K. Jerome famously introduced his 1891 anthology of Christmas ghost stories. Elizabeth Bowen is famous for her ghost stories, several of which are set during the yuletide season. Drawing on the close relationship between Christmas and Bakhtin’s carnival, this paper will discuss the range of Bowen’s Christmas ghost stories in the context of Christmas Gothic and Christmas horror. It considers the nature of gift-giving, of celebration, and family connection, but also of the way in which Christmas is a time of repetition and remembrance. “I believe in God and ghosts!” Bowen herself once said (qtd in MacCarthy 39) – this paper considers how they work alongside one another in Bowen’s Christmas canon, and how these stories contribute to the history of Christmas Gothic.
Jessica Gildersleeve FHEA is Professor of English Literature and Associate Head of School (Research) at the University of Southern Queensland, where she leads research programs in both the Centre for Heritage and Culture and the Centre for Health Research. She is the author and editor of several books, including Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (Brill, 2014) and Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought, and Things (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She is also the President of the Australian University Heads of English, co-editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and co-series editor of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing.
Eibhear Walshe (1962-2024)
The Bowen Society would like to express its sincere condolences to the partner, family, and friends of Eibhear Walshe, writer, academic, and Bowen specialist.
Eibhear delivered the Bowen Society’s Annual Birthday Lecture in June and it was a warm, wonderful tribute, centred around his novel The Last Day at Bowens Court (2020).
He edited 2009 collection of essays Elizabeth Bowen, as well as Elizabeth Bowen Remembered: The Farahy Addresses (1998), and Elizabeth Bowen’s Selected Irish Writings (2011).
Eibhear was Director of Creative Writing in the School of English at University College Cork. He was a prolific writer in memoir, fiction, literary criticism, and biography. His other books included Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life (2006), Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde and Ireland (2011), and A Different Story: the Writings of Colm Tóibín (2013), as well as historical novels on Bowen, Handel, and Mary Travers.
Eibhear will be very much missed in Bowen studies and beyond.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.