Madam, - Elizabeth Bowen may have felt like "a foreigner in both Ireland and England", as Aidan Harmon argues (April 22nd), but she nonetheless gave her allegiance to England. During the second World War she showed where her sympathies lay by spying against Ireland for the British intelligence services. In political terms, therefore, it makes no sense to celebrate her as an Irish writer. That she was an Irish Protestant is irrelevant to the point at issue.
From a literary point of view the case against her is even stronger. A clear-headed critic, Ernest Augustus Boyd, author of Ireland's Literary Renaissance, maintained that to designate Anglicised writers such as Swift, Berkeley, Sheridan, Goldsmith and even Shaw and Wilde as Irish was to debase the idea of a national Irish literature. Their works should be appreciated for what they are: works of English literature, a literature that has, incidentally, generally been popular in Ireland.
Elizabeth Bowen wrote at a time when national independence had been achieved. She could have joined the endeavour to forge a new national literature here. She chose not to. For her services to English literature she was awarded the CBE and made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
Designating her as an Irish writer is like describing the English novelist, Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland, as a Polish writer. Assuredly the Poles do not claim Conrad. They have a measure of cultural self-respect. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID ALVEY, Publisher, Irish Political Review, Dalkey, Co Dublin.