Novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was born Elizabeth Dorothea Cole on this day in Dublin, Ireland. The only child of a lawyer, she took her pen name from the family estate of Bowen’s Court.

The sensitive 13-year-old turned to writing after her mother’s death. “I was in and out of homes of my different relatives,” she explained. “Shuttling between two countries, Ireland and England.”

Inspired by the pain of losing her mother, in 1923, she published Encounters, her first of 20 books — a collection of short stories. Imagination became the salve.

Bowen said, “Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.”

She was praised for her complex characterizations and keen attention to detail. Her introspective work celebrated insight and vulnerability.

“We are minor in everything but our passions,” said Bowen, a close friend of writer Virginia Woolf.

Often compared to Henry James and Jane Austen, her novel The Death of the Heart (1938) explored adolescence and innocence.

“Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have,” she explained.

During World War II, Bowen served as an air raid warden. Her novel Heat Of The Day (1949) captured the tension of wartime London. She wrote: “Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”