In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland to Oxford (where she met Yeats and Eliot), through her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, to her friendships with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Glendinning lifts the veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her novels. 'One of the best critical biographies to have come my way for some time. A beautifully composed portrait.' Sunday Telegraph 'It reads like a good novel.' Irish Times