A conversation between David Trotter and Joanne OLeary about the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973). It was the cleft between heredity and environment that influenced Elizabeth Bowen to become a writer, says David Trotter. Elizabeth Bowen was orphaned at the age of 13, her second dislocation, the first being the move from Ireland to England after her father died when she was 6. Those early dislocations also affected what she wrote about, Trotter insisting there "are more weird households per novel" in Bowen's work than in other comparable writers.