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  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099284758
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $25.00

The Hotel




The first novel from one of the twentieth century's most admired and stylish writers

It's the balmy days of the 1920s and where could be more pleasant for a holiday than a hotel on the Italian Riviera? Filled with prosperous English visitors, the Hotel offers a closed world of wealth and comfort. It also provides the stage for the display of social niceties, for passionate but unspoken love affairs and for the comedy of the shared bathroom. With great wit and insight Elizabeth Bowen's first novel lays bare the intricacies and eccentricities of polite society.

  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099284758
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $25.00

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 The Hotel

The worlds Bowen creates are so immediately absorbing, the glimpses she allows us of the eccentricities of other people's relationships so fascinating, that one cannot help wanting more

Selina Hastings

Those qualities which Elizabeth Bowen's prose exemplifies: a formidable precision of writing, a faithful delineation of mood and place - an aspiration towards the absolute truthfulness of the individual vision-If there is anything to the catchphrase "life felt", it is here - in Elizabeth Bowen's munificence of detail, the fine closeness of the atmosphere which she creates

Peter Ackroyd
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