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  • Published: 15 July 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099287742
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

Eva Trout



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.

  • Published: 15 July 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099287742
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Elizabeth Bowen

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 Shelborne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (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 honorary degrees 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. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

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Praise for Eva Trout

Exhibits extraordinary originality

John Bayley, Independent

Resonant, beautiful and often very funny... Eva is triumphantly real, a creation of great imaginative tenderness

Financial Times

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

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

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