Review: Allan Hepburn, ed. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (2010)
Allan Hepburn, editor. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 381 pp. $135, cloth; $45, paper.
Abstract
Allan Hepburn’s new collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s radio broadcasts, speeches and interviews, Listening In, importantly extends Bowen’s cultural and intellectual range to that of a public intellectual. Though known mainly as a writer of short stories and novels, this collection of her BBC broadcasts (1941-1973) reveals her engagement with the spoken voice, the new media and her times.
If Elizabeth Bowen is a writer with whom we have to “catch up,”[i] Allan Hepburn’s recent collections of her unpublished work will help us along that path.