Two sisters, two weddings, just months apart. These marriages produce a tangle of friends, relations and lovers that starts to unravel ten years later, during one intense week. Two of Bowens most memorable characters are in attendance: Lady Elfrida, a creature of privilege, and Theodora Thirdman, a gawky teenager with zero self-awareness. The sunset of prosperity is upon this complacent, moneyed class, but Bowens precise and beautiful prose pins real pain and comedy upon its inhabitants.

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 byThe 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 Shelborne(1951),A World of Love(1955),A Time in Rome(1960),Afterthought(essays, 1962),The Little Girls(1964),A Day in the Dark(1965) and her last bookEva Trout(1969).

She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees 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. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.