cover image The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen

The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $19.95 (325pp) ISBN 978-0-15-163240-4

These essays, prefaces, reviews, letters and talks by Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Bowen (18991973) include reminiscences and autobiographical sketches of schoolgirl years, wartime London, breaking into print, as well as commentaries on Ivy Compton-Burnett, Cyril Connolly, Angus Wilson, Eudora Welty and other contemporaries. Among the letters are several to Virginia Woolf and William Plomer and part of a previously published correspondence with Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett on ""Why Do I Write?'' Articles evaluate the work of Flaubert, Trollope and Katharine Mansfield. That Bowen's criticism and occasional writings are inextricably related to her fiction is well brought out by Lee (Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation in her preface and sectional introductions. Photos not seen by PW. (May 25)