A laudable emissary, yes; a traitor, no

JACK LANE (Letters, August 20 and September 5) might desist from his continuing efforts to denigrate the memory of the writer Elizabeth Bowen, who is buried in Farahy Church, near Kildorrery in north Cork, of which I am a trustee (my family and hers are related by marriage). He has two grievances in particular against her: one, that she spied against Ireland, betraying Ireland’s interests/secrets to the British in WWII, and, second, on the basis of a fleeting, frustrated remark, that she hated Ireland.

When Mr Lane claims these were “the central focus of her relationship with Ireland”, he is either being disingenuous or displaying his animus against a meritorious representative of the Anglo-Irish tradition, which some two-nations theorists would like to see excommunicated altogether from the Irish nation and put down as English, quite out of kilter with today’s pluralism and multiculturalism.

In 1948, Bowen said, “I regard myself as an Irish novelist. As long as I can remember I’ve been extremely conscious of being Irish; even when I was writing about very un-Irish things … All my life I’ve been going backwards and forwards between Ireland and England … but that has never robbed me of the strong feeling of my nationality.” There is no sign of hating Ireland.