She was the lady of the big house - a writer in residence when she was there, you might say - and all about, an entire north Cork community watched her comings and goings. Now, with her novel, The Last September, being shot on location in Co Meath and a documentary on her life and times due for screening next year by RTE, Elizabeth Bowen is once again set to have the spotlight on her. In her way she was an imperious woman, but the lady who ruled over Bowen's Court, her 18th century ancestral home in Farahy, Co Cork - one of Ireland's great houses, now demolished - had a different side too. Essentially Anglo-Irish, she knew London and Dublin society but felt at home here too, near the village of Kildorrery, perched on a hill with its four wide streets, giving an excellent view of the Galtees.
Her distinctly Anglo-Irish voice was not fluent. She had a speech impediment; a stammer, not a stutter, she insisted. But that never stopped her commanding attention. The journalist Dick Cross, who is from Kildorrery, remembers her driving through the village in an open carriage, her flowing scarf caught by the breeze. In later life, knowing of Isadora Duncan's fate and her tragic death when her scarf became entangled in a wheel and strangled her, he couldn't help but marry the images of the two women. Except that for him Elizabeth Bowen was real and tangible. He could see her and often did as she came and went from the great house, a house, he said, that dominated the locality, "but like a nearby mountain, you knew it was there and hardly looked at it". In any event, it was off limits. But the orchards were not and when the apples were ripe youngsters from the village would go there, to buy some and nick a few.
The orchards were bounded by an eight-foot stone wall. At the entrance there were two gates, an inner and an outer. The outer one could be opened, allowing the apple buyers, their bags at the ready, to ring the bell on the inner gate. That summoned the gardeners, who would fill the bags for a shilling. But the bell could be held silent if the gardeners weren't about, and the youngsters would gorge themselves on the windfalls and fill their pockets before going back outside to ring the bell and do the official transaction. It was good value for a shilling. Bowen's Court is gone. Where it stood there is now no trace of the vibrant social life that gathered within its halls around Elizabeth Bowen. But the gate lodge still stands and is inhabited. Patsy Hannon, an undertaker in Kildorrery, grew up in the lodge with his father, David, his mother, Kate, sisters Margaret, Mary and Kathleen, and brothers Michael and John. His grandfather occupied it before them. His son, Patrick, and his wife, Erica, are there today. "It will be in the Hannon family forever," he says. For generations, the Hannons were associated with Bowen's Court, working there at various tasks.
Elizabeth Bowen was, says Patsy, "a good woman, a beautiful lady. I can remember the excitement at Christmas when she would arrive with gifts for us all. Myself and the brothers would get toy cars, which we would race across the floor immediately, practically ignoring her and her generosity. There would be items of clothing for my parents; the girls would get dolls. She never failed to call. "Up at the big house there would be balls and guests arriving. It was a big social scene, but we never thought of her as anything but a kindly person."
Kildorrery is a small, close-knit community and because the big house was a source of employment, much was known locally about what went on there. It is remembered still that when guests were arriving, hot water-filled stone jars were put in their beds. Then, just before the visitors retired for the night, the maids would go up and iron the bed linen with hot irons to ensure a snug night's sleep. To her biographer, Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen was "a major writer . . . she is what happened after Bloomsbury . . . the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark". At a symposium in Cork three years ago, Glendinning argued that while Bowen's work commanded a special place in the United States, in Britain she continued to lag well behind Virginia Woolf, while in Ireland there was some ambiguity towards her writing. Her forecast was that ultimately Bowen's place in Irish literature would be assured because, as she put it, "quality will out".
It was interesting too, she added, that part of the ambiguity towards Bowen might stem from the fact that she came from the "big house tradition".
Last year, after Bowen was described as an English writer in the North Cork Anthology edited by Brendan Clifford and Jack Lane, the controversial question of her Englishness versus her Irishness arose again . Such labels seem academic when you wander through her home terrain, talking to those who knew her and who have warm memories of her still. Bowen married Alan Cameron in 1923. By 1930 she had inherited Bowen's Court, and in 1952 the couple moved there permanently from England. However, Cameron died unexpectedly and the writer found the upkeep of the house too much of a burden. She sold it to a local resident and the magnificent house was demolished. All that remains is rubble. Between 1923 and 1968, Bowen's output amounted to 10 novels and up to 80 short stories. Apart from The Last September, there was To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949), and A World of Love (1955). This is how she described her beloved Kildorrery: "In no other direction lies any town or larger village, except Shanballymore, for seven or eight miles. Mallow is 13, Fermoy 12, Mitchelstown eight, and Doneraile seven miles from Bowen's Court. Inside and about the house and in the demesne woods you feel transfixed by the surrounding emptiness; it gives depth to the silence, quality to the light."
She was an astute political observer too, writing of the socal class to which she belonged as follows: "In the decade following 1760, the Anglo-Irish became aware of themselves as a race. The `Protestant nation' had been born already - it was to be christened at its coming of age. It was growing up with judgment into the power to place its loyalties where and as it willed. This was the Anglo-Ireland that was to present, for England, an alarming parallel with America."
Now The Last September - the movie - with a screenplay by John Banville, is under way with a strong cast list including Maggie Smith, Jane Birkin, Fiona Shaw, Michael Gambon, Keeley Hawes, David Tennant, Lesley McGuire, and more. Produced by Yvonne Thunder, directed by Deborah Warner, and being made by Thunder Films/Zagros Ltd, it's being billed as "a portrait of the end of an era and the demise of a class and a way of life that had survived for centuries".
And while filming of the movie progresses in the Meath village of Dowth, Death of the Heart, a TV documentary by Araby productions under the guidance of Sean O Mordha, is nearing completion and will be seen after Christmas. O Mordha, a former RTE producer, is now working with the BBC. The Araby production, for the BBC, is in association with RTE. It will mark the 25th anniversary of the author's death and the fact that 1990 is her centenary year. O Mordha is convinced that Elizabeth Bowen is about to come into her own. The documentary, he says, will include dramatic archive film - black-and-white as well as colour - of the London blitz, much of it shot by amateur film enthusiasts. Still photographs of Bowen's Court from 1930 until its destruction in 1959 will show members of the staff, many of whom came from Kildorrery. The cook, and a loyal member of the household, Molly O'Brien, will be there as well as Sarah Barry, the housekeeper. The pictures will also show how vibrant the literary evenings were in the big house. Elizabeth Bowen's guest list says it all: Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Sean O'Faolain, Hubert Butler, Evelyn Waugh, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and many more literary luminaries.
The contributors to the documentary will include Finlay Colley, a cousin of the writer and literary executor of the Bowen estate; and the Colley sisters, Mrs Valerie Hone, Mrs Veronica Hall-Dare, and Mrs Rosemary Croker, first cousins of the author. Gilbert Butler, a family friend, will appear as will Victoria Glendinning, and Roy Foster, Oxford Professor of Irish History and biographer of W. B. Yeats, who has championed the writer's cause. The renewed interest, O Mordha is convinced, will give Elizabeth Bowen the place she deserves in the canon of Irish literature. The documentary will include footage of the writer and will reveal much that had not been known. She could become quite frosty, for instance, when addressed as Elizabeth Bowen. Her preference was to be called Mrs Cameron. Of the sale of Bowen's Court, she said a "clean end" to matters had been achieved. But the whole thing troubled her. To be the owner of an Irish country house, she said once, was something between a privilege and a predicament: "there never had been enough money. I feel very sad about it".
Her one consolation was that Bowen's Court never lived to be a ruin. When she died she was buried in the churchyard at Farahy.