Bowen's Court

Bowen’s Court narrates the story of the ancestral Bowen family home and it is also an autobiography, although a “deflected” one. A feature characterizing female autobiographies, it indicates that the protagonist is not at the centre of her work: Elizabeth Bowen’s self-narrative is deflected upon Bowen’s Court, the survey of its estate, and the history of her family, the typical features of Anglo-Irish autobiographical discourse. Moreover, differently from male autobiographical discourses in Ireland, the female autobiographical subject does not subscribe to the identification of self and nation. Bowen’s Court both epitomizes the decline of the Anglo-Irish through its own decline and demolition and traces the evolution of this class, which is reflected and individualized in the history of the Bowen family and its residence.