BOWEN'S COURT & SEVEN WINTERS

In Seven Winters Elizabeth Bowen recalls with endearing candour her family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyes of a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds. Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when the author, the last of the Bowens, was forced to sell the house she loved. With the mastery that is the hallmark of her novels Elizabeth reviews ten generations of Bowens as representative of a class - the Protestant Irish gentry. Their lives were ones of fanatical commitment to property, lawsuits, formidable matriachs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking and breeding, self-destructive and self-sustaining fantasies...