ABSTRACT
In her essay ‘Coming to London’, written in 1956, Elizabeth Bowen looks back on her experience of travelling from Ireland to England for the first time and recalls the ‘fictitious existence’ London had previously held in her mind. She speculates that: ‘If I had been an American child instead of an Anglo-Irish one, it is possible that London, from being farther in the distance, would have been more clear-cut as an idea: I should have some rational notion of it, instead of being infested by it imaginatively’.3 The picture Bowen has formed of London is one gleaned from books and has ‘the obsessive hold of a daydream; it invested itself with a sensuous reality – sounds, smells, motes of physical atmosphere – so powerful as to have been equalled since by almost no experience of so-called reality’.4 Bowen describes how her ‘Earls Court lodgings had the merit of being round the corner from Lilley Road, mentioned in Sinister Street. When I moved in, theatrical autumn sunshine bathed this first part of London I was on domestic terms with, and thin blonde leaves drifted through the air…’.5 The fact her road has been mentioned in a novel by Compton Mackenzie is enough to overlay the reality of her London lodgings with a romance, which Bowen acknowledges is perhaps slightly rose-tinted by her reference to the ‘theatrical’ nature of the autumn sunshine that colours her memory of the place.
