”An hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.”
“Mustn’t that be,” said Ronald, “what people come out for?”
“Perhaps some—”

“But are there really people who would do that?” asked Ronald sharply, in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. “You mean women?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Milton…

The Hotel is Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, published in 1927, the same year that Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse. While the two books’ concerns are rather different—Woolf is concerned with family life and its changes and various estrangements in a new era, while Bowen is concerned with Brits abroad in the Italian Riviera while their world at home is falling apart—they way they approach things is eerily similar. Both have a New Woman figure at their center (Lily Briscoe in Lighthouse and Sydney Warren in The Hotel); both of these women express admiration for older women of the previous generation in covert homoerotic tones, while also being adamant in their desires to break free from the constraints of the older, pre-War world that was still so steeped in Victorian norms.



Maud Ellmann says that “as a first novel [The Hotel] is astonishing.” And it is: the social banter of The Last September is here, coupled with a melancholy for a world that will soon collapse into an ineffable unknown; the deep interiority and psychological explorations in other novels like The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day; and the playfulness mixed with droll seriousness that one finds scattered in the best of Bowen’s short stories. Truly a 5-star book, had this been written by anyone other than Bowen, the weaknesses are perhaps overlooked easily given this is her first novel; however, it’s hard to believe that this is a first novel at all, given what control Bowen has here, and how far-ranging her insights. A novel about women’s friendships and alliances while in solitude or in the enforced company of men, The Hotel dips into gender politics more deeply than To the Lighthouse does, but, as a first novel, it lacks the emotive symbolism and skilled technique that Woolf employs; indeed, at times, Bowen’s fictional hotel is so far removed from Britain and the action that’s taking place there, that one can’t help but feel that the characters exist in a bubble and that there is nothing whatever going on in the world at large—unless, of course, this was her intent.



Bowen said that she liked the idea of a hotel as a place to cage her characters, to force them into interactions with each other, to set the stage for different social classes to engage with each other, and to elicit quiet scenes of drama, passion, repression, and even rebellion that might not otherwise have occurred. The scenery of the Riviera is evoked exceedingly well, and this book is perhaps an excellent primer for those who find later Bowen to be often tediously difficult, with her deep interior plumbing of characters and her often idiosyncratic and disarming way of phrasing sentences that causes the reader to question events just as much as her characters do.

 While The Hotel seems to owe more to Woolf than to James, Bowen's later work is a true synthesis of her own style that shows her debt to both literary figures, but is more Jamesian in its scope and concentration.

This new edition, published by University of Chicago Press (who also reprinted Bowen’s third novel, Friends and Relations) is a beautiful edition indeed; Ellmann’s introduction situations The Hotel within Bowen’s oeuvre and there really is no better critic today writing on Bowen’s singular work. ( )

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Here is a time capsule from an era when (fairly) wealthy English people could afford a season long holiday in Italy. The "will they won't they" romance is the most interesting aspect of the story. Each sentence has so many dependent clauses that it become a little difficult to follow the author's train of thought (which says as much about my reading comprehension as her writing style!). The author is an expert at capturing the varied nature of shy people--what memes these days would just call, "Awkward!" Recommended for all readers. ( )

Not the easiest or best Bowen, but I do love the place this book brings me.

1.5* - Blergh.

She did not want to go down to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs Kerr sat on here, watching her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.
‘I have heard so much of your service. Today I am really going to watch it.’
‘This is one of my off days.’ ‘
Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.’ Mrs Kerr laughed. ‘I’m unlucky.’
‘Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit anything.’
‘What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney! How terribly sinister! It had never occurred to me that my eye might be evil. I meant something much more prosaic – that I happen to miss things.’

Well, I somewhat sympathise with Mrs. Kerr. I, too, miss things, and one of things I have missed was the point of this book. I have heard so much praise of Bowen's work that reading her first novel was a huge let down.

I first read about the The Hotel in connection with the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. When reading up on the history of the trial and the ban of the book in the UK, some of the sources cite other books published in 1928 which also are attributed with a lesbian theme. Anyway, one of the articles referred to The Hotel not being considered for censorship because it was too "reticent".

Reticent, indeed. I had no expectations (or indeed any particular wish) to read about any romantic entanglements between the main characters, but I did expect the book to have story or a point but it seems that even these eluded me.

The Hotel is about a group of English tourists (mostly women) who holiday in a hotel in Italy. There is a group of older women, a few younger ones and the two main characters - Mrs. Kerr and Sydney. The tourists basically provide the soundboard of conventional upper-middle class society against which Mrs Kerr and Sydney develop their friendship, though Mrs Kerr is characterised so ambiguously that it is difficult to say whether she is one of the old "conventionals" or not.

Anyway, so during the holiday, Sydney meets Mrs Kerr and the two become friends and somewhat abstain from mingling with the rest of the guests. Their friendship is somewhat disrupted, however, when Mrs Kerr's son arrives at the hotel and one of the other guests, a clergyman, falls in love with Sydney and proposes to her. She refuses, then accepts, then breaks it off. Then guest start to depart.

Really, there is not much of a story.

What was more aggravating than the non-story was the writing. Yes, there were some great paragraphs, one my favourites being:

"On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be enough to awake one in terror."

However, they were so few embedded in so much pretentious drivel that just would not come to any point.

‘There are situations in life,’ said Mrs Pinkerton, ‘face to face with which one is powerless.’ Though she only meant that in the struggle for life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility.


The only character that made me finish the book was Sydney, who is a straight forward sensible character.

‘Doesn’t it rain? I like it!’ she was moved to exclaim. ‘If I were Monet and alive now, I would paint this and present the picture to the P.L.M. as a poster for the Côte d’Azur.’ She smiled out at the rain with an air of complicity. ( )