Reading Elizabeth Bowen with Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley’s enthusiasm for reading is inspiring – and contagious. Join the award-winning author of The Party and Late in the Day for this close reading seminar on three short stories by Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. This Workshop is aimed at published writers. Do contact us with any questions.

Ahead of the workshop, you’re encouraged to read the following short stories:

• Joining Charles
• The Easter Egg Party
• A Day in the Dark

All three stories are featured in The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: Selected and Introduced by Tessa Hadley (Vintage, 2023). If possible, you should also read an edition of Bowen’s classic novel The Death of the Heart. 

In Tessa’s words: ‘Bowen doesn’t waste anything, nothing in any given sentence is slack or dull.’ Evoking emotions such as grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness and dread, Bowen's writing travels from the countryside of her native Ireland to the streets of London after the Blitz.

But is Bowen beginning to belong to the past, with other classics, or can contemporary writers still make use of her work directly, to inspire them? Does it matter that she writes out of a class hierarchy whose shape has changed so radically since her time?

Join Tessa for this exhilarating look at Bowen’s short stories – it’s hoped that you’ll leave the class with inspiration to channel into your own writing.

Tessa Hadley has published eight novels - including The Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love - and four collections of short stories; her latest collection, After the Funeral, came out in paperback in July 2024 and her novella, The Party, was published in October 2024. She has short stories regularly in The New Yorker, and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books; she was awarded a Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize in 2016, and the Edge Hill Prize in 2018.

Elizabeth Bowen (born June 7, 1899, Dublin, Ireland—died February 22, 1973, London, England) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer who employed a finely wrought prose style in fictions frequently detailing uneasy and unfulfilling relationships among the upper-middle class. Notable for her books about "the Big House" of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London. The Death of the Heart (1938), was one of her most highly praised novels.  In 1958, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson.