Cover

About the Book

These were the balmy days of the 1920s. The English, liberated from one long war and not yet faced with the next had – at least when well-off – a confident kind of vitality. The Hotel was a comfortable hotel on the Italian Riviera, run for prosperous English visitors. It was a closed world of wealth and a setting for the inexhaustible comedy of casual personal relationships among a variety of ‘nice’ people, all English, all wittily reflected with characteristic vivacity.

Elizabeth Bowen’s wit and her exact eye for social detail have often been compared to those of Jane Austen, and the similarity is perfectly captured in this, Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen’s Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen’s Court, which she inherited.

Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee’s, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelbourne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), After-thought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book, Eva Trout (1969).

She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Also by Elizabeth Bowen

ALSO BY ELIZABETH BOWEN

Encounters

Ann Lee’s

The Last September

Joining Charles

Friends and Relations

To the North

The Cat Jumps

The House in Paris

The Death of the Heart

Look at All Those Roses

Bowen’s Court

Seven Winters

The Demon Lover

The Heat of the Day

Collected impressions

The Shelbourne

A World of Love

A Time in Rome

After-thought

The Little Girls

A Day in the Dark

Eva Trout

Title Page

Elizabeth Bowen

THE HOTEL

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Quarrel