There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.