Elizabeth Bowen, The Good Tiger

Jessica Gildersleeve (University of Southern Queensland)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1965

Places

Ireland, Republic of (Eire) (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Children's Literature
Story

Resources

It is an oft-quoted story of May Sarton’s that Elizabeth Bowen’s husband, Alan Cameron, would always pause “before the abstracted gaze of a tiger or panther” at the Regent’s Park zoo to exclaim, “Elizabeth!” (cited in Ellmann p. 32) Despite this apparent uncanny cognisance between Bowen and the zoo’s big cats, in many ways The Good Tiger, first published in the United States in 1965 and in the United Kingdom in 1970, seems an odd departure from the arc of Bowen’s body of work. A picture book for children in which a lonely tiger is invited to a tea party by a kind boy and girl, it is, superficially at least, incongruent with the civilised and “adult” matters of Bowen’s other fictional and non-fictional w…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1116 words

Citation: Gildersleeve, Jessica. "The Good Tiger". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 May 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10662, accessed 24 November 2024.]

Save this article