Patricia Laurence has published widely on transnational modernism and women writers. Her publications include The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (1991); Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (2001); Julian Bell: The Violent Pacifist (2005). She recently published the biography, Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life (2020).

“Linearity does not tally with Elizabeth Bowen’s style of writing, living, or remembering, and this engaging critical biography presents what Laurence ably demonstrates to be Bowen’s ‘kaleidoscopic life’ as private woman, public intellectual, spy, propagandist, and author in a style and format that does her intriguing and contradictory subject justice.”

—Mary Burke, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut, USA, and author of “Tinkers”: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller.

Recent articles, “The Dreamwork of a Nation: from Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen to Mary Lavin,” Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2022; “The Daring Smiles of Ancient Women: Modern Conjectures of Anna Banti & Elizabeth Bowen,” TAB Edition, Jan.2025.