Description
Book SynopsisFrom the 1940s until the 1960s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote essays for radio broadcast, improvised interviews on the air, and gave public lectures. These public appearances were a trial for her because she had a pronounced stammer. She thought her recorded voice sounded alien, like the voice of a stranger. She complained that reading her own work on the air gave her lockjaw. Nevertheless, she was a spellbinding talker, as her many friends commented. Invited to university campuses in the US and the UK, she delivered important speeches on language, the fear of pleasure, character in fiction, the idea of American homes, and other topics. Inveterately curious, Bowen wrote about media as a personal and social force.
Without fuss or pretension, she documents her love of cinema in the 1930s and the making of Lawrence of Arabia in the 1960s. Her first efforts for radio were adaptations of her own short stories and dramatizations of literary subjects. She quickly turned to commentary on culture, such as the beginning of the BBC Third Programme and the atmosphere in postwar Czechoslovakia. In this regard, the radio and the speech shape Bowen''s persona as a public intellectual capable of talking on numerous subjects with wit and general insight.
During her lifetime, Bowen published a few of her broadcasts in collections of non-fiction. Listening In brings together a substantial number of her ungathered and unknown works for the first time.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; Plays for the Air: The Confidant; New Judgement: Elizabeth Bowen on Jane Austen; London Revisited: As Seen by Fanny Burney; A Year I Remember - 1918; Broadcasts: Book Talk - New and Recent Fiction; The Next Book; Impressions of Czechoslovakia; Mechanics of Writing; Books that Grow up with One; The Cult of Nostalgia; Coronation; On Not Rising to the Occasion; Writing about Rome; Ireland Today; The Daughters of Erin by Elizabeth Coxhead; An Essay in French; Panorama of the Novel; Speeches: Subject and the Time; The Poetic Element in Fiction; The Idea of Home; Language; The Fear of Pleasure; A Novelist and His Characters; Film and Radio: Things to Come; Why I Go to the Cinema; Third Programme; Lawrence of Arabia; Appreciations: Downe House Scrapbook 1907-1957; Alfred Knopf; Blanche Knopf; Questions: Confessions; The Cost of Letters; Portrait of a Woman Reading; Interviews and Conversations: The Living Image - 1; The Living Image - 2; How I Write: A Discussion with Glyn Jones; A Conversation between Elizabeth Bowen and Jocelyn Brooke; Do Women Think Like Men?; Do Conventions Matter?; Conversation on Traitors; Frankly Speaking: Interview, 1959; Notes; Works Cited;
