irish writer elizabeth bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was only six weeks old when, on a July evening in 1899, she was first brought to Bowen's Court, the ancestral home of her forbears near Kildorrery in County Cork. Down the upper avenue jogged the inside car, carrying Elizabeth, her nurse and her mother, Florence Bowen, proud after nine years of an infertile marriage to be bringing home an heir at last, even if it was a girl, for the family was not bound by the Salic law. Inside the house she turned up the oil-lamp in the hall so that the baby could be seen by everyone and compared with the faces in the family portraits lining the walls, and of which there were plenty for the Bowens had been in County Cork since the middle of the seventeenth century. Originally from the Gower peninsula in Wales, the Irish connection began when a Henry Bowen came to the country as a lieutenant-colonel in Cromwell's army. According to family tradition he acquired his land in a most romantic way. He had two pet hawks of which he was very fond, but during an altercation with Cromwell, the latter wrung the neck of one of the birds, killing it. He made up the rift by offering Bowen as much Irish land as the other hawk could fly over before coming down. And so, set off by its master from the foot of the Ballyhouras mountains, the bird flew south, winning for the Bowens over eight hundred acres of land around the hamlet of Farahy. This story was later invalidated for Elizabeth when she was told that a hawk flies straight up and hangs in the air until it drops on its prey, but be that as it may the bird remained the Bowen family crest.