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 works. And yet, in this short text cohere many of Bowen’s…
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Citation: Gildersleeve, Jessica. "The Good Tiger". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 May 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10662, accessed 24 November 2024.]
