The Hotel

Elizabeth Bowen's first novel brilliantly captures the inflammatory mixture of passion and repression among British tourists on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s.

The aftermath of the first World War haunts the background of Elizabeth Bowen's remarkable first novel. A luxurious seaside hotel on the Riviera, filled with a cast of well-heeled and often comic English vacationers, seems a closed and comfortable world, marked by dramas no more momentous than tennis games, picnics, and idle gossip. But for the young women of the 1920s facing a dearth of eligible young men after the war, it is a battleground for the clash of tradition and modernity. Sydney Warren, a young lady who has been sent abroad with a chaperone, is both emotionally detached and rebellious, signalling her discontent with the blood-red scarf she habitually wears. As she tests the boundaries of her incomplete freedom--and becomes increasingly obsessed with a clever and charming older woman--she bewilders her suitors, her handlers, and herself. With the psychological precision and command of atmosphere that marks Bowen's most famous novels, The Hotel depicts a collection of privileged men and women in determined denial of a world that is falling apart around them.

ELIZABETH BOWEN was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. Her book Bowen’s Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork. Throughout her life, she divided her time between London and Bowen’s Court, which she inherited. She wrote many acclaimed novels and short story collections, was awarded the CBE in 1948, and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973.