Information
Having spent part of her childhood in different towns on the Kent coast, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen was probably very familiar with the Thanet coastal landscape. Her books emphasise the relationship between characters and their environment . In ‘Eva Trout’ (1969), one of her last novels, the desolate atmosphere of Kingsgate Bay on a winter’s day is evoked as Eva takes a reluctant drive with the lover she thought she had managed to leave behind, the husband of one of her best friends.
Quotations
The Anglia … quickened on entering open air – passing the lighthouse, they swooped down the loops of the road to Kingsgate Bay. One grade above sea-level, two great white-painted lions outside a great white closed house looked across, watching the tide go out. Not a ship in sight – and the road, in the bright boundless chill of the salty evening, was vacant also. Even the wind had gone. The outgoing water sucked and dragged at the wetted edge of the beach, but you could not hear.
Some way ahead, to the east, like a kind of beacon, the Captain Digby crowned the sawn-off headland terminating the bay. Now, building and cliff were one in an hallucinatory afterglow : B-A-R was able to be deciphered. Eva … was trailing a look through the back window at what they were leaving behind them : Kingsgate Castle. The crenellated mock fortress, flint-hard in silhouette, rode forward over the waters towards France.
Place | Extract |
| Broadstairs | The interaction of her characters with their surroundings, particularly with the effects of light, is important in her writing and her last novel, ‘Eva Trout’ (1969), some of which takes place in Broadstairs, shows this strong sense of place... |
| Kingsgate | Having spent part of her childhood in different towns on the Kent coast, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen was probably very familiar with the Thanet coastal landscape... |
