Jane Bowles: That Modern Legend

Abstract

Jane Bowles was born in New York in 1917 and died in Spain, in 1973, in a convent hospital. She wrote Two Serious Ladies (published 1943) when she was only twenty-five, a novel celebrated by writers in her own time, and exemplary of late modernist fiction. Her only play, In the Summer House (performed in New York in 1953), and a number of short stories (such as ‘Camp Cataract’ and ‘A Guatemalan Idyll’, 1944) collected in the volume Plain Pleasures (1966), not to mention part of a new novel, Out in the World,¹ were written before Jane Bowles suffered the cerebral haemorrhage in 1957 which made writing extremely difficult. Having lived for a time (with her husband, Paul Bowles) in a Brooklyn boarding house (where Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, and Gypsy Rose Lee had also boarded), she and Paul began their nomadic existence, living in Europe, Central America, then Mexico, and Ceylon, before settling eventually in Tangiers in 1947.²