Elizabeth Bowen Personality

The belief that Mrs. Drover was experiencing effects from psychological disturbances as opposed to a supernatural occurrence is further proven by Elizabeth Bowen’s own experiences, especially those with war, tragedy, and mental sickness. This is because Mrs. Drover greatly resembles Elizabeth Bowen and her experiences. Elizabeth Bowen, born Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, was born on June 7, 1899 to her parents Henry Charles and Florence Isabella Bowen. She was the couple’s only child (Jenkins). “Her parents were Anglo – Irish Protestant and upper class” (Ellmann 9). Her father was a lawyer and her mother tended to the house and family. A sense of displacement as well as mental illness plagued both her and her family. Elizabeth was born in

“From this point on, Bowen was to travel back and forth between England and Ireland, both in fact and in her fictional imagination”(Ellmann 9). While she lived in Ireland, she lived at Bowen’s Court, which was her family’s expansive and luxurious estate (“Collection 13” 1017). During the summers she lived at Bowen’s Court, and during the winters she lived in Dublin. She later moved from England to Ireland several other times before her death. During that time, she had been involved in two world wars, married, worked as a nurse, and served as an air raid warden (Ellmann).

Elizabeth’s early life led her to have a sense of displacement parallel to the displacement Mrs. Drover experienced in The Demon Lover when she had to move to the country during World War I. Elizabeth Bowen was separated from her father when her and her mother moved to England. This was due in part to her father’s mental state. In 1905, her father succumbed to mental illness, diagnosed as “anemia of the brain” (Ellmann 27). Her father, Henry ,had to “work in an office under a high pressure” for the Irish Land Commission (Glendinning 28). As his mental state progressively worsened, people around Elizabeth and her mother became very concerned about their well-being