Elizabeth Bowen's first novel brilliantly captures the inflammatory mixture of passion and repression among British tourists on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s.
The aftermath of the first World War haunts the background of Elizabeth Bowen's remarkable first novel. A luxurious seaside hotel on the Riviera, filled with a cast of well-heeled and often comic English vacationers, seems a closed and comfortable world, marked by dramas no more momentous than tennis games, picnics, and idle gossip. But for the young women of the 1920s facing a dearth of eligible young men after the war, it is a battleground for the clash of tradition and modernity. Sydney Warren, a young lady who has been sent abroad with a chaperone, is both emotionally detached and rebellious, signalling her discontent with the blood-red scarf she habitually wears. As she tests the boundaries of her incomplete freedom—and becomes increasingly obsessed with a clever and charming older woman—she bewilders her suitors, her handlers, and herself. With the psychological precision and command of atmosphere that marks Bowen's most famous novels,
The Hotel
depicts a collection of privileged men and women in determined denial of a world that is falling apart around them.